Leveraging Shopify Live Chat to grow your eCommerce business

For companies involved in eCommerce, sustenance depends on converting one-time visitors into repeat customers. Without coming in physical contact with the customer, this might seem a bit difficult. But not anymore!

It is now possible to deliver personal touches and make every visit a pleasant experience for the customer by making use of Live Chat applications. Let us look at some statistics.

•       Live chats help to convert 38% of visitors into customers
•       92% of customers who use the Live Chat, experience enhanced satisfaction
•       87% of customers like to share their positive online experiences

Using the Shopify Live Chat also ensures that visitors stay on your website longer than they would otherwise. It, thus, offers you an excellent opportunity to enhance conversions.

So what is the Shopify Live Chat?

It is a customer service channel used by eCommerce store owners to provide real-time support to their customers. It is a sure-shot tool for increasing customer satisfaction. One important point that needs special mention here is that your choice of Live Chat app plays a critical role in the success of your Shopify strategy. Hence, you need to choose a Live Chat application that is robust enough to handle your current needs as well as any additional needs you are likely to have in the future. Once this is taken care of, your Shopify store might just surprise you with unique perks where customer satisfaction is concerned.

Ways to leverage Shopify Live Chat

As with every marketing tool or channel, you need to have a strategy that will help you leverage the benefits of Shopify Live Chat. Your strategy should ideally include the following points.

1. Reduction in customer resolution TAT: Most customers want a prompt reply to their queries. By reducing the resolution time, you can enhance customer satisfaction.
2. Live Chat personalization: While company representatives get an opportunity to personalize their customer interaction by personally interacting with them, the same should be implemented in a Live Chat. Statistics show that 74% of customers leave the Live Chat midway when they find the answers to be robotic and impersonal.

So use your Live Chat as a CRM tool by:

       ○        Storing customer data

       ○        Keeping a record of all previous conversations

       ○        Taking note of their product preferences, order issues etc.

Use this data to customize your Live Chat. The results will certainly surprise you.

• Multiple support integrations: Live Chat personalization is only possible when you integrate it with the other customer support channels that you use. There should be no disconnect present irrespective of the method a customer uses to contact you be it Live Chat, email, social media, IVR etc. This unifies the brand experience, thereby impacting your sales positively.
• Optimal automation of Live chat using Macros: The concept is to keep updating your Live Chat responses and convert them into a robust platform that can answer the bulk of common customer queries. Create your auto-responses or macros by carefully analyzing your customer queries and segregating them into different sections like general questions, payment, shipping, order processing, refunds etc.
• Data collection: This is an important component that helps you to drive online sales growth. Data collection can be effectively done by:

○        Analyzing frequently asked questions

○        Individually going through all support tickets raised

○        Creating tags and using them as a labeling system to sort and segregate the tickets

○        Collecting brand-specific statistics

•  Feedback tracking: This will help you gain an insight into the thought processes of your web visitors like:

○        What they think about your brand

○        What their needs are

○        What are their likes and dislikes

○        What makes them happy

○        What confuses or frustrates them etc.

Convert this insight into actionable improvement steps by redefining the terminologies used in your Live Chat, your Live Chat layout and navigation etc. You can add further value by taking customer requests and suggestions into account. 

By implementing the above into your Shopify Live Chat strategy and optimizing your Shopify Live Chat, you stand to derive several other important advantages.

Let us take a look at these additional advantages.

1. 1. 1. It helps you to reduce your internal expenses and speed up your workflow
      2. Your first-response TAT decreases along with your resolution time
      3. There is a substantial increase in customer loyalty and this gives rise to new business opportunities you would not want to miss
      4. By nurturing your relationship with your customer, you can improve your brand trustworthiness and attain a competitive advantage
      5. By automating your communication, multi-channel communication gets streamlined
      6. You can also serve many customer queries at the same time
      7. Live Chat can also be integrated with other available marketing tools resulting in enhanced sales.

The result of all the advantages mentioned above is the same; an increase in customer satisfaction. Statistics show that by using Live Chat strategically, approximately 80% of your customers will leave your Shopify Store satisfied with your services and want and be happy to come back again. 

Shopify Live Chat mistakes to avoid-A word of caution

Many eCommerce companies using the Shopify platform are unable to realize the full potential of the Shopify Live Chat. This is because of some common mistakes that they make. Let us enumerate them below so that you can avoid making these mistakes while using your Shopify Live Chat.

• No automation: If you do not automate your chat, you cannot serve multiple customers at the same time. Additionally today customers prefer self-service to agents taking time and manually answering their queries.
• Too much process automation: While some automation of your Live Chat is good, too much automation can have a negative impact. This is because a fully-automated Live Chat is unable to give correct answers to all queries and nothing puts off a customer more than irrelevant answers to their queries. So have a backup plan ready!
• Excessive wait times: Today all customers require quick answers. No customer is ready to wait for long to get their queries answered.
• Robotic communication: The enhancement of technology has made it possible for Live Chat users to implement a personal touch. If you don’t take advantage of this, then your chat becomes very robotic; something that no customer likes.
• Use emojis strategically: While Forbes mentions that the use of an emoji is equivalent to writing 1000 words, remember never to overdo it.
• Improper data collection: Live Chats, wherein the agents are aware of the customer’s account history, result in enhanced customer satisfaction. Customers feel such agents add value.  So keep this in mind and ensure your data collection is extensive and effective.

Hope you have gained a good understanding of how to leverage your Shopify Live Chat. It is a very easy strategy to implement but the impact it has on your customer retention and revenue generation is immeasurable.