Build a Successful eCommerce Business using Chat.

Last Updated on August 31, 2023 by David

An in-depth look at boosting engagement and conversions using chat.

Adding live chat to an online service or storefront is a growing phenomenon. Chat allows customers and potential shoppers to connect with someone at the business in question in real time and obtain help with unparalleled precision. Along with the growth of mobile and social media platforms, chat is a necessary asset in your tool belt when it comes to engaging customers and converting them to buyers.

However, chat can become a liability and an unnecessary strain on your resources without a firm understanding of how it should coexist with other communications channels. To build an eCommerce brand that focuses on chatting to customers must require a systematic understanding of how chat will affect the entire customer lifecycle positively. Data from around the industry is apparent:

63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat as opposed to one that doesn’t. — Forrester Research

44% of customers said that having a live chat specialist available during an online purchase was one of the most important features a company can offer. — Forrester Research

The following article is broken into 6 sections.

Understanding Chat
Understanding Customer Needs
The Business Case for Chat
Picking a Chat Platform
Testing and Implementing Chat

Understanding Chat

Chat, sometimes known as live chat, comes in a few different formats, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The three major formats are session based chat, asynchronous chat, and proactive chat.

Session based chat is something most of us are familiar with. Many enterprise businesses use session based chat to help customers. The likes of Amazon, Comcast, and even Nike all use session based chat to solve one-on-one customer issues.

Session based chats have a few advantages and disadvantages. Because each conversation is tied to a unique session, the customer and agent must both be online and connected in order to chat to each other. This guarantees instant responses and any questions or concerns can be addressed as long as they’re connected. The chat can only end if one party chooses to end the chat. Once the chat has ended, it cannot be continued. This unique advantage is also its disadvantage, however. If no agents are available to service a session based chat, customers need to wait or be forced to reach out using another method such as email or phone which defeats the initial intent of “live chat”. Waiting times and the unavailability of agents can be a depressing experience for customers waiting for help.

Proactive chat (sometimes known as proactive engagement) is the latest trend in chat software. It can be served both as session based chat or asynchronous chat. While session based chat and asynchronous chat need to be customer initiated, proactive chat can automatically invite customers to chat based on certain rules and conditions. This layer of functionality can achieve multiple business goals such as increasing conversion rates by offering help or discounts at just the right place, nurturing leads by capturing customer information at the right time, or serving contextual marketing content intelligently to educate customers and increasing stickiness or engagement.

Understanding Customer Needs

Implementing chat of any format can be a complex process that requires aligning multiple business areas. And a successful chat implementation isn’t as simple as picking a solutions partner and checking it off your to-do list; that usually comes last. Savvy businesses understand that making chat successful requires ongoing refinement of existing business rules and workflows that will augment chat invitations, conversations, and customer experiences.

Customers have questions and concerns. When more than 1 in 5 online shoppers choose to engage in chat of some sort, it usually indicates a critical need to have concerns addressed prior to purchasing or during a purchase. According to Forrester Research, “57% of online consumers say that they are very likely to abandon their purchase if they can’t quickly find the answer to their questions”. Leaving customers hanging with key unanswered questions during the buying process is as effective as simply closing shop during a busy Saturday afternoon. Chat platforms provide customers immediate access to help. Wait times are often much less than email or calling and customers can easily multi-task while waiting.
Customers need the occasional hand-holding. Presence is an important trait carried over from brick and mortar stores. The expectation that live help is available when they need it is essential for business owners to understand. Even if customers don’t use it, the mutual understanding that someone is available will help convince shoppers to buy rather than wait.
Customers want to chat but rarely have the opportunities to do so. Business owners should know that chat isn’t just a customer service fad. As chat technology and vendors continue to grow, chat is becoming an essential cornerstone of doing business online. In fact, over 90% of consumers who’ve experience live chat are satisfied with its ability to aid in their online buying decisions, resolve tech or service related issues, and get answers in a timely manner according to MarTech.
Customers are becoming quickly accustomed to proactive chat than ever before. When Forrester Research first published the study on chat for online businesses, only 27% of customers preferred being invited to chat while 71% preferred to initiate the chat themselves. However, as proactive chat technology improves over the next few years, businesses will have access to better and more refined controls over how proactive chat is targeted and presented to the customer.

The Business Case for Chat

When businesses first evaluate the viability of chat implementations, several key goals should always be top of mind.

Chatting to customers in some way shape or form helps increase sales and average order values through understanding customers better and being able to offer relevant up-sells. In addition to increased sales, chat also serves to decrease abandonment on product and sales pages. For eCommerce businesses in particular, cart abandonment rates can be as high as 65% (Invesp). Implementing chat can help reduce abandonment due to concerns over shipping costs, return policies, payment and checkout options, lack of information, and general hesitation.

Implementing chat properly provide reciprocal access to happiness, satisfaction, and convenience. Chat is as good as it gets when it comes down to instant gratification. Email and phone support often require wait times beyond most consumers’ comfort levels. Without proper access to data and relevant customer histories, email and phone support cannot out-compete chat in terms of speed, thread length, and resolution quality. Faster and more accurate exchanges reside in chat platforms capable of bringing together conversational elements with pertinent customer data, resulting in greater customer/agent satisfaction and convenience.

Chat can turn your customer service operation from a cost center into a revenue center. Because chat is faster, capable of reactive and proactive engagement, cost less to staff-up, and has a proven track record in boosting revenues, a well-thought out implementation can save any business up to 50% in customer service costs overall. On average, a single customer service agent can handle up to 10 chats simultaneously and up to 60 chat conversations daily. These specific attributes make chat a far more appealing choice compared to phone or email. In the graphic below, you can see how eCommerce stores of varying sizes staff up to service chat conversations.

Implementing chat will always give you insight on your customer’s pain points. Easier access to chat conversations will almost always surface data points about what customers are looking for, the issues and confusions they might have, and problem areas that arise on a repetitive basis. Coupled with analytics, reporting, and existing data integration, a good chat platform can be invaluable to a business looking to grow online. On the flip side, what you discover from your chat conversations brings you insight on what needs improvement, not only for your website content, but for the products and services you offer. Getting better with chat overall is an efficiency-boosting exercise designed to improve other business processes such as internal communications, logistics, sales, product development and provide opportunities to better utilize a subset of tools.

Picking a Chat Platform

Implementing a chat platform begins with picking a chat platform. The process of picking a chat platform isn’t just complex but touches on many aspects of your entire business and every team.

It’s important to determine which aspects of your business chat will help. In other words, create a business case for yourself. Like adopting any technology solution, achieving the desired ROI is of utmost importance. Start by defining key business strategies, objectives, and goals to make a case for chat. If those strategies involve teams beyond customer service such as sales or marketing, making a business case for proactive chat will make even more sense. Get the process started by doing the following:

Allow people who talk to customers most drive the conversation. Determine who these teammates are and have them brainstorm about what they need most out of a chat platform.
Set up a group brainstorm session with other team members who don’t speak to customers on a day to day basis and determine if a chat platform will be useful to them. Sales, marketing, and product functions make the most sense.
Compile a list of existing tools each teammate uses on a day to day basis and figure out what is core and what isn’t.
Research potential chat providers such as Reamaze, cost, degrees of involvement for an implementation, and how the chat platform can work with existing workflows of other teams.
Obtain buy in from other teams so you can proceed with a trial account.

An sound implementation process by definition must consider the impact of chat across multiple areas of your business. These include operations, technology, and user experience. Sales centric chat implementations are usually sales focused and adopt features like CRM and contact management more so than support centric chat implementations. Once a business narrows down on some potential choices, it’s important to establish operational metrics that align with overall and existing goals as well. Increasing levels of complexity across multiple teams that interact with customers through chat will make cross-functional requirements and needs more apparent. CRM and knowledge bases are the most obvious use cases. In these cases, it’s important to find a chat platform that can also provide these tools in a cohesive platform and offer customers a pleasant, high ROI experience.

Beyond operational metrics, businesses must also determine which metrics will ultimately reflect the benefits of chat and how performance will be calculated. Most chat platforms up to the task will usually have detailed reporting that give you insight into not only staff performance but also core metrics that illustrate customer satisfaction levels. All teammates that a chat platform services must work together to establish cross-functional metrics. Having a firm understanding of what customer satisfaction metrics looks like will provide actionable insights as things evolve.

Here’s an example of what a feature spreadsheet for a chat platform might look like. The example is based on Reamaze asynchronous chat, sessions based chat, and proactive chat features.

Testing and Implementing Chat

A successful chat implementation needs a business to perform ongoing testing, analysis, and refinement in three key areas: rules under which chat is utilized, execution of chat servicing in a customer context, and resource management such as staffing and chat hours.

In the section above, the business case for chat identifies two main use cases: increasing sales conversions and preventing lost sales opportunities. Start by identifying sections of your website or storefront where these opportunities might crop up.

Individual product pages might have a great conversion rate, but what about your “Policies,” “Pricing,” or “Contact Us” pages? It’s general practice to implement chat on the main homepage as well where potential customers are still on the fence about your brand. It’s entirely possible that those pages aren’t converting as well as they should.

Create a list of all key pages on your where potential customers might shop or linger. Which pages on your site are your potential customers likely to run into problems or questions? Which pages are filled with content where distractions might be a negative?
Figure out each of the pages current conversion rates, times of high and low traffic, how existing content can be optimized, and how customers reach each of those pages. This sets up a baseline for which pages will benefit more from chat implementation.
Research each page’s funnels, try to figure out the amount of time required for either abandonment or sales. If, for example, it takes a customer on average, 30 seconds before they submit a contact form or abandon the page, it will make sense for you to send a proactive chat invitation at 20 or 25 seconds.

Once you have figured out which pages convert well and don’t convert well, you can create defensive and offensive rules to better take advantage of chat.

Defensive Rules and Conditions

These chat triggers include product pages that see high abandonment rates, checkout or cart pages, or prolonged periods of inactivity indicating hesitation or confusion. The most obvious defensive rule for chat to show up is when and if a potential customer is about to leave the page.

Offensive Engagement

Offensive rules trigger proactive chat invitations mainly for cross-selling or up-selling existing products. These are great educational conversations where incremental revenue can be realized with a simple chat. If your sales team is able to offer advice and help to a customer buying a coffee maker on your store, it might make sense for them to also pick up a pack of extra filters or even coffee.

Here are a few examples of offensive engagement chat invitations:

Pick the “time on page” rule and set to “equal to or greater than the 30 seconds.” The time is based on what you have calculated to be the average time it takes for a certain action. It’s also beneficial not to distract customers before you’ve given them a chance.
Pick the “number of visits” rule and set to “greater than 4 times”. A welcome chat invitation set to “Welcome back, do you have any questions?” will approach customers who’re obviously on the fence and doing research.
Pick the “referring URL” rule and set to a specific URL such as a Facebook campaign and set the invitation message to “Liked us on Facebook? Chat with us for a special discount!”

Ongoing Iteration and Refinement

Successful chat implementation, whether session based, asynchronous, or proactive, is an ongoing process and requires constant evaluation from a business. eCommerce businesses especially, constantly optimize product pages, update inventory, and change up branding elements. These variations call for constant testing and revisions to existing business rules and chat implementations. These testing exercises will ensure high adoption rates, conversion rates, and abandonment reductions are sustained in the long term. And finally, consider starting small and building a chat centric business one step at a time. Customer engagement is a broad spectrum of work that cannot be completed over night. Get your teams involved and expand when needed.

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