When you’re thinking about adding a new channel to your Shopify ecommerce store it should be stress free. Especially when you’re thinking of adding a channel that has a bad reputation like live chat.
The perception is that adding a live chat app will bombard your team with incoming customer requests.
You imagine customers will be asking for more help purchasing, chasing up location of orders, or other specialized requests that you’d prefer to receive over email. Will your team be able to handle the new, incoming workload?
In a word, yes.
Customers prefer to contact you over live chat. So those worries you have about increased chat requests can be put to the side. Email, social, and phone conversations will move to your chat app.
A live chat app for your Shopify store will benefit your team and customers
Live chat is a great way to get personal with new and existing customers. Being personal counts towards meeting your business goals.
Statistics on live chat show that a live chat app for a Shopify store can grow sales, revenue, and customer loyalty:
- Grows sales: 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer live chat support
- Increases revenue: 63% of people who spend between $250-500 a month online are the most likely to both buy from, and be loyal to, companies who offer live chat
- Keeps customers loyal: 51% of consumers are more likely to stay with or buy again from a company if they offer live chat support
Here’s exactly what the best live chat software can do to win new customers and support existing ones.
What goes into the best live chat app for your Shopify store?
Live chat can be a rewarding channel both financially and through customer loyalty. Stores that offer the best live chat experience have more revenue up for grabs.
A live chat app that increases revenue for your shopify lets you:
- Get personal and grow revenue
- Sell and target the right customer
- Add a human touch to your support
Get personal: The best Shopify live chat app grows revenue
Live chat gives your Shopify store a human touch. Live chat is the only one-to-one real-time interaction a customer can have with your team. Consider it the online version of the friendly shop floor clerk who’s ready to assist a customer when needed.
And this is where live chat is vital, because 83% of shoppers report needing help at some point during their buying process. When a moment of indecision strikes the customer and they want to ask a question, you and your team can be there.
And if you’re not offering live chat, you might be missing out on revenue:
- Consumers who spend between $250 and $500 a month online, are the most likely to be influenced by the availability of live chat.
- 45% of those big-spend consumers are more likely to buy from companies who offer live chat support, and two-thirds are more likely to be loyal too!
Consumers are more comfortable doing business with Shopify stores that has a live chat app because they are seen as more approachable, helpful, and customer-centric.
The best Shopify live chat app increases sales
The channels you offer customers to contact you can have a big impact on your store’s conversions. Our report shows that almost 4 in 10 consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer live chat. That’s just the presence of live chat, that doesn’t mean they’re using it!
But live chat isn’t about being available when the customer needs you. The great thing about modern live chat is you can use proactive engagement to grow sales.
How an ecommerce store can grow sales with live chat
In this quick walkthrough, we’ll look at how Brewfictus—a fictional coffee equipment supplier—creates an engagement rule in Kayako.
Brewfictus are an eCommerce retailer who want to upsell visitors who have been on the site before. They have set up their engagement rule to target highly engaged visitors (who’ve viewed over 3 pages), in the city of San Francisco, and who are looking at a relevant product web page.
Now, to ensure that visitors only receive these messages when the Brewfictus team are around to help—and avoid offering a poor user experience. Time-based targeting options make this possible.
With time-based targeting Brewfictus can set their their proactive message to show after three seconds (because above criteria has qualified them as engaged) and only during business hours.
The last touch is crafting a personal message. The best messages grab the visitor’s attention in as few words as possible.
Craft your message with you goal in mind. To recap, Brewfictus are trying to upsell San Francisco based customers who have viewed three webpages.
They decide the best message is personal and pushes their brand new product. They follow customer engagement best practices and use a question to begin a conversation:
But that’s not the end, because you can come back and measure the results!
After a week, our fictional Brewfictus coffee supplier looks over their results. They can see that the message was delivered to 70 visitors, clicked on by 16, but only two conversations were started.
Armed with this information, Brewfictus can revisit their targeting and message to improve engagement, and get more people into their store!
Kayako’s customer engagement features let you proactively reach out to users on your website. Use your Shopify live chat app to target, engage, and convert visitors into customers. A simple proactive greeting like “can I help you find anything today?” is a customer-centric way that shows you’re willing to help when asked.
The best Shopify live chat app increases delight and keeps customers loyal
When you think of adding a live chat app as a support channel, it needn’t fill you with dread of increased customer demand. Live chat is actually a customer’s preferred channel. Email requests will more likely to be had in real-time conversations and you can always work on your FAQs to help with deflecting simple questions from your support inbox.
Live chat offers a way to give your customers support and it’ll pay you back, as 55% of shoppers are likely to abandon their online purchase if they cannot find a quick answer to their question, according to Forrester’s data.
Put yourself in the shoes of this agent for a second. I bet this feels familiar:
Of course you’d be happy to help the customer, but don’t you wish they could elaborate on their issue?
You have to prepare yourself to dive into the back-and-forth, by first responding politely and asking for more details to dig deeper into their request.
You get to the problem: incorrect entry of the CVV code on the back of Taylor’s credit card.
Didn’t that seem a lot of work for something so simple?
Deliver delight and reduce the back-and-forth
Handling these requests is frustrating for both the agent and the customer. They both know it’s simple, but they have to engage in this back-and-forth to land on the issue.
With the customer journey in Kayako, your agent doesn’t need to jump from one app to another to problem-solve the issue as the context is right there in front of them. You can see Taylor’s Help Center browsing history, and what she was looking at before she makes contact. Stripe and Shopify integrations tell the agent that Taylor’s payment failed due to an incorrect CVV code – so there’s no need to ask.
And that makes your reply easy:
“Hey! Looks like you’ve hit a snag while checking out. Try again with the last three numbers on the card and it should work.”
This context from the customer journey helps both the customer and the support team get exactly what they want:
- The Customer Journey gives the customer what she wants. Taylor’s needs are met on the first attempt: personal support with minimal back-and-forth and this will make her more loyal, as The Effortless Experience, by CEB Insights, found that the less effort for customers to get support also correlated with an improvement in loyalty.
- The Customer Journey gives the support team what they want. And for the support team, this looks great on your insights and performance metrics: your conversation resolution time just went down, and you’ve created another satisfied customer.
Still looking for the best Shopify live chat app? Try Kayako
Looking for the best live chat app for Shopify where you can support current customers, increase repurchases, and win new ones? Kayako Messenger might be the perfect solution for your Shopify store. It’s 100% free to start your trial today.
Start your free trial or find out more about our integration with Shopify by contacting our sales team.