105 Reasons Why a Live Chat Is a Perfect Fit for Your Online Store

Live chat is a handy sales and customer support tool that has already become a necessity.
Valerie, a growth marketer at Dashly, has talked to 105 marketing fellows from other companies and checked if they found a live chat tool useful (spoiler alert: they did!).
We started to use the JTBD framework when conducting our researches, and soon we found out that we should analyze every single Dashly feature taking into account its job. We were curious about how companies in the e-commerce industry use a live chat tool to boost their sales. So, this study helped us to understand our current customers’ needs better.
In this article, we’ve collected the most important insights about what makes a live chat so good and how you can make it even better on your website.
Time and again, I’ve split-tested e-commerce landing page traffic with and without live chat, and only one time out of 50 was live chat not significantly more profitable, with increased conversion rates, increased average order rates, and increased customer satisfaction. Depending on the product price and customer demographic, the increase in overall revenue using live chat can be anywhere from 5% to 15%.
Why you need a live chat on your website
In a nutshell: live chat encourages users to purchase and dramatically increases the conversion rate to order.
Timely support can bring you huge profits: users who get quick and precise responses to their questions are more likely to make a purchase.
An eCommerce that I worked earlier saw an increase in the order rate by 15 to 20 percent, including a drop in the abandoned cart by 25 percent. The live chat option engages the customer as soon as they land on the platform. This makes the customer feel welcomed and well-taken care.
The chance to talk to potential guests in real time as they browse your website is priceless. 40% of our post purchase surveys indicate that our live chat was something that helped them decide to make a purchase.
It’s crucially important to answer all questions and help customers deal with their doubts regarding complex and expensive products, goods, or services.
With many of our clients being in the ecommerce space, the decision on whether or not to implement live chat is something we have studied and tested heavily. Ultimately have found live chat to be essential to the customer experience, and a major proponent in maximizing conversion rate. This was especially true for newer, less established brands and stores selling big ticket items. Often answering just a few simple questions can build the necessary level of trust customers need to make a purchase they are uncertain about.
Being a national jeweler, we sell mainly high ticket items. Having the availability to chat with us online before people purchase helps us close the deal. Especially with consumers that have not heard of our brand before, chatting with us helps to establish trust putting them as ease to purchase items that are sometimes $10,000 and up!
Besides, live chat helps proactively engage users in a conversation and increases the conversion rate to purchase. Erico Franko, an Inbound marketing manager from Agencia de Marketing Digital shared his view of what an engaging chat message should look like:
We are using live chat for e-commerce and it has increase the sales! But you need to setup it correctly: This first message or trigger message will impact your conversion rate so its important to provide some information related with the product page customer is visiting. This will really catch the attention and increase the chances of the user interact with your bot and convert in the end.
Read our article with 25 welcome message ideas.
Another way of engaging a user to a conversation and helping them make a purchase is to offer them some value. Swati from HearMeFolks suggests:
Live chat can prove to be one of highest selling points for your store and help you attract more customers by providing them with personalized product suggestions. It can even be used for providing first-time buyers with exclusive discount coupons, which in turn will win you a new customer.
Live chat is a familiar communication channel for your users
In a nutshell: live chats are the most convenient communication channels for your customers; they are engaging and fit perfectly into the consumer habits of your customers.
Your target audience is got used to chats.The more convenient it is to contact you, the less likely customers will leave for your competitors. Making them call or email you when you can do without it means losing your customers.
Bret Bonnet from Quality Logo Products, Inc. shared his insights with us after a survey with 5000 respondents:
We discovered that the majority of people between the ages of 25 and 40 prefer live chat versus using the telephone. We also discovered that users often use or rely on the availability of live chat as a way to quantify the legitimacy of a business!
No surprises here, as chat messages are easily perceived and well-integrated into new customer habits. Thus, Saurabh, founder of Talk Travel claims that chat messages perform better in terms of engaging users in a conversation:
Because of its quick messaging, and normally generating a curiousness amongst the customers — chats initiate a response from them, thus opening to further communication.
And Jake from Auto Accessories Garage shared an intriguing insight into why chat messages are more appropriate than phone calls:
And a fact of life in the modern world, many customers do their shopping when they’re at their job and perhaps should be working. They may not be able to pick up the phone in their office environment, but they can happily chat with our agents on the site!
As Darcy noted, customers find it convenient to stay in touch in live chat after placing an order:
We’ve also found that once people have ordered live chat is the most common way people like to keep in touch regarding their order progress and tracking too. It’s a great way to alleviate any anxieties surrounding high-cost purchases and build great relationships with our customers.
Darcy, E-commerce and marketing manager at Living Entertainment North Coast
Collect feedback and understand your customers better
In a nutshell: live chat will shed the light on unobvious consumer insights.
Live chat can reveal many useful insights into what difficulties customers face and how a website can be improved. You can consider at which stages of the customer journey most questions arise and ask them directly if they are satisfied with your store.
Live chat gives an opportunity for the potential customer to ask their questions then and there only, which helps in ultimate conversions. These questions help you to understand about the customers behaviours, their questions, and problems they face — which can help you to tune out your other marketing strategies also.
How you can make your live chat better
Live chat as a part of the website’s strategy and ecosystem
In a nutshell: a live chat must not contradict other widgets and marketing campaigns.
Implementing a live chat on the website is not enough to make the conversion rate skyrocket.
Alice Bedward from Roosh notes that you’ll need to spend a lot of time and effort developing an effective live chat strategy:
Selecting the right live chat software and adding it to your website is only the first step. You’ll need to consider aspects such as personalisation, triggers, chat templates, CRM integration, and analytics, to get the most out of using live chat software. For instance, most chat systems can be configured to automatically invite visitors to chat based on their site activity. When a visitor acts on a pre-selected trigger, the chat box will pop up automatically, inviting them to chat. If planned correctly, this should be perfect timing for visitors who need assistance and a perfect sales opportunity for you. But implemented without due care or concern for the customer, this can lead to a negative experience and potential lost sales. There’s a fine line between a template that saves time, and a canned response which seems irrelevant, stiff, or even confusing to the customer.
Rameez Ghayas from PureVPN advises you to make sure that live chat will be an integral part of your website:
Before integrating the Live-Chat feature on your E-commerce store always make sure that you provide a small pop-up at the bottom of the screen which does not affect the UX of your website because many websites that offer this feature are very irritating. The chat pop-up keeps on appearing on the screen, blocking the main content.
Quality customer support
In a nutshell: customer support should either work perfectly or not work at all not to disappoint customers.
A live chat widget on the website is not enough: you must provide high-quality support to improve customer experience and increase the conversion rate to purchase. You need to make sure that the user problem is actually solved. We’ve already elaborated on what the ideal support should be.
There’s nothing more disappointing than to click on live chat within business hours to find that there are no agents available and I would question if that actually creates a worse experience than not having a live chat functionality at all. By having a live chat button on your site, you essentially sign up to keeping that manned with the correct level of resource. If not, then how does it really differ to email?
Incompetent live chat agents can ruin the customer’s attitude towards the company and certainly will not lead to an increase in sales that everyone wants so badly. The Workers Compensation Shop’s president Walt Capell notes that all company employees should interact with customers in a live chat:
Do not plan to train one or a select few employees to monitor the chat. Train many if not all employees on the service. This training is needed because if you only train a select few employees and those employees end up sick or on vacation at the same time, the chat may not satisfy the customer. For most businesses, this is not a problem. For some businesses, not properly operating a live chat can cause the business to lose customers.
Build long-term relationships with users
In a nutshell: long-term trust-based relationships with users are key to generating sales.
Aggressive sales via fixed scripts have already become tiresome and customers don’t start to want to give you money.
You need to build long-term relationships with customers so that they are satisfied with your work, come back to make repeat sales, and recommend you to their friends.
Live Chat is an excellent way to engage visitors from the beginning. It improves the credibility of the store, and credibility plays a critical role in the eCommerce industry.
Talk to your customers, offer benefits, answer all questions, be there for them in hard times, and this will help users make a purchase.
A ccording to Arin Spanner from Get Virtual, a live chat is a great tool to show the user that you care about them:
Studies show when a business goes above and beyond to solve a customer’s problem, that customer is actually more loyal than the one the business served without issue. Live chat offers you the opportunity to show the customer how important they are and make a lasting impression.
Chatbots are the thing of the future
In a nutshell: the balance between chatbots and agents is very important
Let’s keep talking about the excellent support. Chatbots are great because they:
- decrease the response time,
- can deal with typical questions,
- take routine tasks off agents,
- can qualify leads and do other amazing things.
We’ve tested and compared 7 chatbots to each other that will help your team.
Our respondents agree and advise to use chatbots in addition to other live chat features.
First of all, live chat easily allows users to implement AI-chat bots that can either help figure out a problem without a customer support agent or help direct the issue to the right one. Second, it allows for shorter waiting times and more precise feedback, not to mention file and link sharing when that is required. Lastly, it’s great for the company. A single support agent can only be on a single call at a time, while live chat allows an agent to deal with multiple clients at a time, speeding up response time, customer satisfaction, and efficiency.
Samantha from Romantific advises to use chatbots, but not to replace agents’ work with them completely:
The use of chatbots has its disadvantages because your queries are sometimes not appropriately answered and it’s annoying. Unlike in live chat, a real person can answer you and responses get higher credibility, thus, creates a big impact in letting the customers know how good your products and services are.
Sudhir from YNG Media also notes that chatbots cannot replace live communication:
Ecommerce companies need to develop more chatbots to resolve customer queries, but also a human should take over after a certain point in the sales funnel.
Read more:
- How to optimize the support workflow
- Major mistakes of support agents and how to fix them
- The key support and chat metrics you should start measuring today