Unlocking the Power of Live Chat for Shopify

As a famous retail saying goes, “Customers remember the customer service a lot longer than they remember the price.” The internet has changed the way people shop beyond all recognition. According to reference, 57% of people prefer online shopping, as it is the most convenient and easy way of shopping for products these days. The challenge here is the absence of human relationships.

One needs to be on top of all requests that a particular product is receiving, so they do not miss out on sales. This is where live chat applications on Shopify come into place. Live chat tools are generally multi-use. Meaning they are used by consumers placing orders, clarifying queries, and even sometimes complaints.

Here are a few facts about eCommerce Live Chat applications:

• 79 % of customers prefer live chat to any other communication medium.

• Consumers who use live chat are 2.8 times more likely to convert.

• According to Shopify, shoppers who chat with businesses via Shopify Ping (Shopify’s official Live-Chat app) are 70% more likely to convert.

Moreover, with its many advantages, live chat is gaining popularity and growing rapidly. Implementing a live chat tool not only increases conversions and revenue but also simplifies the customer's experience and lowers operational costs.

So, let us discuss Live Chats, what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to benefit your store? The points that we will discuss in this blog are;

• What is Live Chat?

• Why does your store need a Live Chat?

• Why do customers love Live Chat?

• Best practices and tactics to run a live chat successfully

• Best Shopify Live Chat apps

• Case Studies of Successful Live Chat Implementation

• Conclusion

What is Live Chat?

Live chat is an online communication app that allows you and your website visitors to communicate in real time. A live chat welcomes visitors as soon as they enter your Shopify store, website, or app. It allows your staff to interact with them, creating a strong bond between the two. It is not limited to human interaction only, and chatbots can also be integrated with live chat.

A chatbot is a computer program that is used over the web to simulate human conversation via chat. A chatbot is designed to work autonomously. Chatbots can handle a high volume of chats without breaks, but they lack empathy. Based on the issue’s complexity, the best bet would be to use both- chatbot and live chat on your Shopify store.

This can take the customer experience to the next level.

Why does your store need a Live Chat?

The more you interact with your visitors, the more opportunities you'll have to convert leads. You'd eventually have many contacts in your mailbox. You'll not know what you do not know until your customers tell you. As a result, many shoppers abandon their carts without explaining why. Therefore, the solution lies in optimum communication with the shoppers.

That is precisely why you need Live Chat support. Let us take a deeper dive into the features and benefits of Live Chat.

Impressive Benefits of Live Chat:

‍Faster customer support.

‍Customers prefer live chat because it allows them to answer their questions instantly. With live chat, you give customers a way of reaching you right when they have questions or issues that they can't solve. The immediacy of getting help is why customers prefer Live Chat as a method to communicate. It's difficult to predict when they will receive a response via email or social media. Also, with careful scheduling, live chat support can be made available 24/7.

Better Customer Engagement.

‍Customers who are engaged feel a bond to a company, and it may be because they like the goods, the brand, or the company's values and principles. A positive and pleasant dialog with somebody from your store would make customers feel connected to you. With increased customer engagement comes a chance to make a good impression and give customers a reason to stick around.

Boosts your customer service team’s productivity.

Live chat support will also help your customer service agents work more efficiently. Although a person can only take one phone call or respond to one email at a time, they can multitask with chat. They may want to stick to one or two for trickier issues involving research and reporting. If the chat is filled with fast and easy questions instead, juggling 4 or 5 at once is manageable for customer support.

Increased conversion, better sales.

How customers can contact you can have a significant effect on your store's conversions. However, live chat isn't only about being available when the customer needs it. The wonderful thing about live chat is that it helps you use proactive engagement to increase sales. Better engagement and communication builds customer’s trust in you. This makes it easier for customers to buy when they know they can easily contact you in case anything goes wrong.

Why Customers Love Live Chat?

The best thing about Live Chat is that not only do store owners love it, but the customers love it too. The reasons customers prefer Live Chat are:

• Without any external communication like WhatsApp or email, they can easily report their queries and problems.

• No one likes waiting. With Live Chat, they don’t have to wait for a reply.

• With live chat, their shopping experience is satisfying and pleasing.

Best Practices and Tactics to Run a Live Chat Successfully

Some of the best ways to master your Live-Chat game are:

Empathize and Get Personal.

Live chat gives a human touch to your Shopify store. Live chat is the only way for a customer to communicate with your customer support team in real-time. Consider it the online equivalent of a casual conversation with a salesperson. Request your agents to always put themselves in the shoes of the customer. They should convey that they understand the customer's problem and that they will find a way to fix it.

Use positive language and proactive greetings.

This one will seem obvious, and it is. You must be positive when it comes to customer service and sales. However, while you are surely aware that you must be positive, ensuring that you interact using only positive terms and phrases is more difficult than you would think. Customers will be put on the defensive if negative connotations are used. Also, send proactive greetings that are personalized based on when a customer arrived at your website or how they interact with it.

Have meaningful conversations and develop relationships.

It's important to respond to customers quickly, but that doesn't mean you must hurry through each conversation. Before saying goodbye, make sure each customer has had all of their questions answered and is fully pleased with the outcome of the discussion. Request the satisfied customers to join you on social media and/or post their positive experiences online.

Boost profit with upsells and suggestions.

First, relax the customer, establish trust and respect with him and ask appropriate questions to learn about their requirements. Finally, while emphasizing an offer on the product, suggest appropriate upsells to them. If there's no offer, you can always create one.

Recommended Live Chat Apps for Shopify Store

Good experiences make customers want to come back again and again. Bad customer service makes customers never look back at your store. You must invest in a good Shopify Live Chat app to avoid any such misfortune.

We’ve listed some good Shopify Live Chat apps for you below. Have a look.

• Dozens of Automation and Bot templates for increasing sales, as well as virtually limitless possibilities thanks to the powerful editor; (Periods instead of semicolon)

• Widget customization options are aplenty; (Periods instead of semicolon)

• The ability to see in real-time what your visitor is typing; (Periods instead of semicolon)

• More than 20 integrations are supported.

Happy Chat

With this application, you can chat, support and resolve the queries of your customers in real-time through WhatsApp. You can also add multiple agents for customer support as per their availability hours. This application directly routes customers to those agents which are less busy and increases your customer support’s efficiency.

Advantages:

• Effortless Integration with WhatsApp

• Provides live chat, support and resolves queries in real time

• Enables multiple agents to work in shifts as per their availability

• Provides detailed analysis of pages that are most converting

Prices: Basic plan is Free of cost

Rating: 4.3/5

Tidio

Tidio manages all customer interactions seamlessly and integrates all live chat, e-mail, and messenger communications like WhatsApp and Facebook into a single platform from which you can quickly respond to all queries.

If you want to make your Shopify store a lot more ‘smarter,' Tidio also offers AI-powered chatbots for your Shopify that you can use to send automated messages based on visitors’ behavior and increase sales.

Advantages:

• Dozens of Automation and Bot templates for increasing sales, as well as virtually limitless possibilities thanks to the powerful editor.

• Widget customization options are aplenty.

• The ability to see in real-time what your visitor is typing.

• More than 20 integrations are supported.

Prices: Free plan as well as advanced plan at $18/month available.

Rating: 4.7/5

Gorgias

Gorgias can easily handle incoming requests from various channels in a centralized interface, increasing the efficiency of your store.

It can significantly reduce your response time because it provides beautiful pre-made templates for quickly resolving customer issues and allows you to set up automated responses that are linked to personalized messages.

Advantages:

• Allows you to see which pages your customers are visiting and access their purchase history.

• Allows you to create specific rules to manage your inbox in order to respond to customer inquiries in a matter of seconds.

• Allows you to view customer order details, refund, cancellation, and order duplication without leaving the help desk.

• Also, it activates live chat and contact forms on key pages of your store and displays chat history details in a single unified view.

Prices: From $60/month. 7-day free trial.

Rating: 4.7/5

Reamaze‍

Reamaze is a comprehensive solution for your Shopify store that includes live chat, chatbots, and quick access to your customer data. It handles order returns, refunds, cancellations, and other issues in conversations that help your customers have a better shopping experience.

While chatting with customers, it can quickly send the most relevant products, allowing for quick decision-making.

Advantages:

• When compared to other helpdesks, this one is more efficient and comprehensive.

• Easily manage multiple stores.

• Not only chat but also text, social media, push notifications, SMS, VOIP, and WhatsApp.

• Increase your revenue, conversion, and retention.

Prices: From $29/month. 14-day free trial.

Rating: 4.9/5

LiveChat

When customers talk with you, LiveChat helps you sell more by sending related product suggestions. It enables you to apply tags to all chat messages, resulting in a more meaningful context. These tags are also used to filter reports, providing you with easy access to your customer data. You may also run a post-chat survey to find out how satisfied your customers are with your customer support.

Advantages:

• Provides over 170 integrations to help you take your Shopify store to the next level.

• Allows you to give canned answers, saving time answering repeated questions, and providing a messaging mode to reconnect with your customers at your leisure.

• When you are offline, your chat widget will be replaced with a ticket form, allowing your customers to contact you.

• Allows you to integrate a knowledge base into your chat widget so that customers can find answers to their questions by typing specific search phrases.

Prices: From $19/month. 14-day free trial.

Rating: 4.3/5

Read More: Best Live Chat Apps for Shopify Store

Case Studies of Successful Live Chat Implementations

Smoke Cartel

Smoke Cartel Inc. is a glass manufacturer that manufactures and sells vaporizers, beakers, spoons, scientific glass, water and hand pipes, tubes, and other smoking accessories. During a period of rapid growth when the company was expanding into a 30,000-square-foot facility to navigate the growth better, it encountered various problems due to the shutting down of its customer services. It took more than two days to respond to a customer service request without an internet connection at the new place. Moreover, the company was unable to respond to phone calls or emails for several days.

The solution was to launch 24/7 live chat support with more personnel during critical periods to react quickly and eliminate the current backlog. Smoke Cartel posted the following results shortly after using Live Chat:

• Overall, customer service response times decreased by 93%, from two days on average to one hour.

• 30% of all customer service inquiries were handled in and under 15 minutes.

• Due to Smoke Cartel managing more responses at a faster pace, customer satisfaction increased by 11%.

To know more about how they did it, click here.

Lush

Lush is a global cosmetics company with 1,000 outlets in 52 countries. Lush offers "new handmade" soaps and cosmetics that are vegetarian and vegan. The cosmetics company takes pride in its customer service, giving each person the time and attention, they deserve, whether they are in a store or on its website. Its team wished to replicate this experience on their website. Lush has observed that customers who chat with their Customer Care team convert 174 percent higher than customers who do not chat with their team during the last year.

Lush Cosmetics UK was able to duplicate their in-person consultations in an online environment thanks to live chat. This allowed them to continue establishing relationships with customers.

To read more about it, click here.

Bank Of American Fork

When working with banks and other financial institutions, we often encounter a great deal of bureaucracy and numerous hurdles to jump through.

The Bank of American Fork, a Utah community bank, takes an unusual approach to banking. Introducing customers to LiveChat was one of the most secure methods of contacting the bank.

Live Chat improved its customer experience at a low cost by making it more accessible, faster, and easier to connect with customers.

To read more, click here.

Conclusion

Providing a great customer service experience is key to the success of any Shopify store, and live chat is a vital part of that. As a result, be certain that you select the best live chat app and apply practices that are best suited to your company.

We have also handpicked hundreds of eCommerce resources that can help you build your store.

Kaushik Nath

Content Crafter at RaftLabs