From time to time, Lumav team is approached for advice on what an e-store should have and how to use new technologies to increase sales. Below, in partnership with domestic chat provider Askly, we take a look at customer support chats, their impact on conversion from visitor to customer and return on marketing investment.
There are many solutions on the market, ranging from free with limited functionality to chat with a wide range of integrations and features for a monthly fee of €200-500. Success can be achieved faster with proper tools. We therefore encourage you to give Askly a try, especially as the development investment is lower and the learning curve shorter in comparison to other solutions.
The Askly solution can be seen on nearly 300 Estonian websites today, e.g. Ballzy, Marmara, ONOFF, ON24, Aatrium, Elke Mööbel, Macta Beauty, Charlot, Büroomaailm, Kalev SPA, Adduco, Kangadzungel, Hookusbookus, FruitXpress and many more.
Where to start in chat adoption analysis?
At the outset, there must be an objective that the company’s management wants to achieve with a e-commerce customer support tool.
The most common objectives for implementing customer support chat are:
- consolidating customer communication across different channels into a single platform
- faster and more convenient customer communication – more and more customers tend to prefer chat to phone calls.
- digitalisation of customer communications, allowing better recording, analysis and, if necessary, replacement of customer support representatives.
- bring more customers to the website, keep them there longer and thus optimise the page for search engines, i.e. better SEO.
- actively increasing sales via chat and reducing abandoned shopping carts.
- removal of language barriers
More data for more effective customer support
Customer support live chat is a channel where staff can help customers in real time, operating on data that speeds up the service and sales process. The customer does not have to repeat elementary things to the customer support team, they can start creating value immediately.
For example, the whole team can see which product page the customer is on in real time and between which products they are choosing. Also the customer’s location by city, browser and device data.
In the event of a technical error, the necessary input with technical details can be sent to the development partner immediately, reducing the time of the development partner’s tester.
The customer service representative has an overview that would be missing when responding via email, phone or social media.
Speed and quality of customer support determine up to 30% of customer repeat business
By communicating with more than 2,000 e-store and website administrators in Estonia, the Askly team, together with customer service experts, found that:
- the average company in Estonia has at least 5 channels to communicate with customers: phone, email, Facebook, Instagram, chat website – all of which increase the workload of customer service representatives.
- around 70% of shopping carts are abandoned, 30% of which can be rescued by customer support (including chat intervention).
- 38% of consumers do not speak Estonian well enough
- 50% of good customer support candidates remain unselected because they do not speak at least three languages.
- consumers aged 25-35 prefer live chat, i.e. direct communication in a chat window with a customer service representative (not a robot).
For the most part, e-stores only used monolingual chat, which also will lose the history of the conversation as soon as the customer leaves the page for even a moment. In the worst case, they lead the customer away from the e-store’s website to social media, which increases the number of abandoned shopping carts.
The total amount of abandoned e-commerce purchases in 2022 was €18 billion. Customer support can reduce this loss by as much as 30% by increasing customer loyalty and repeat purchases.
How to choose the right solution?
There are many chat tools. Askly team made a quick summary of common customer support and chat solutions and their pros and cons:
Summary
It could be said that the presence of chat in e-commerce is already a given rather than a convenience. Customers expect it.
Real-time customer support chat is an essential tool for any business that customers are looking to contact and that sees the potential for business growth through more effective interaction with customers.
As is standard practice, chat questions are answered by the same staff whose job it used to be to answer emails and calls (which chat reduces).
A proper tool for communicating with customers can help increase conversions by up to 10 times. The company’s management needs to clearly prioritise this objective, as the speed and quality of responses depends on the motivation of the customer support team.
Putting a chat solution in place is generally not technically difficult and it is not expensive to try. It can, however, help to save many a missed sale, and to highlight problems that might not otherwise be reported. It can be argued that the investment in a chat solution can pay for itself in one large shopping cart saved.
Lumav and Askly teams can help you with both technology and experience.
If you’re interested, book a demo on Askly webpage and involve your team.
Together, we can make your customer support team more efficient and help you increase the sales!
