Managing Reactive and Proactive Live Chat for Ecommerce Support

Are you having a difficulty wrapping your head around “how live chat can boost sales on your eCommerce website?”

Well, it’s simple. Live chat for eCommerce enables your buyers to chat with customer support operators about issues or problems in the middle of a purchase. Buyers can request to chat from anywhere on the site where there is a click-to-chat widget such as in the homepage, product page, checkout or on the contact us page. Any chat agent who belongs to one or more chat queues can respond to the request.

Live chat tool like Offerchat.com streamlines the delivery of service on your eCommerce website to shoppers across your market industry.What brings us here to this point is the issue on how to handle the tool in a way that chatters can utilize live chat effectively through reactive and proactive chat practices.

Managing live chat through reactive chats

Do you know that 67% of shoppers with a previous chat experience actively seek chat options on eCommerce websites? With this figure in mind, reactive chats or chats initiated by buyers should not end up a disappointing experience. Below are chat focus areas which businesses should keep an eye on during a reactive chat:

1. Speed of response rate
2. Accuracy of responses
3. Satisfactory conversation flow
4. Live chat system features
5. Agent communication abilities

Are you doing reactive chat wrong?

You are if you agree (and nodding your head in the process) on the following practices:

1. Agent types emoticons, lol words, ALL CAPS, in short incomplete responses
2. Live chat platform failure due to frozen chat initiation page or connectivity issue
3. Disappointing responses making shoppers feel less prioritized or important
4. Slow response time and failure to use canned responses to common queries

Managing live chat through pro-active chat invites

Visitors who are invited to chat are 6.3 times more likely to convert into customers than those who don’t. Of those, 61% converted to customers within the first chat (Forrester Research, 2008).

Defined by pre-determined conditions (proactive chat triggers), more and more ecommerce businesses favor the proactive approach. Below are common chat triggers put in place by ecommerce websites to initiate chat by invite:

1. Shopper backing out of the shopping cart
2. Time spent on a page
3. Specific products viewed
4. Number of pages viewed on the website
5. Appearance of high value customers (repeat customers)

Are you doing proactive chat wrong?

You are if you agree (and nodding your head in the process) on the following practices:

1. Intrusive proactive chat window taking over almost half the page
2. Proactive chat invite interfering with shopping esp. during checkout
3. Repeated invites in each page shoppers visit
4. Proactive chat invite right after chat session

Live chat for eCommerce websites indeed helps in boosting sales conversion providing businesses the opportunity to provide exceptional customer support, thus facilitating customer satisfaction leading to sales. In fact, 44% of online consumers express the sentiment that having their questions answered by a real person in the middle of a purchase is one of the best features that a website can offer (Forrester, 2010).