A guide to Live Chat Support: definition & benefits

Flowio
4 min readJun 16, 2021

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Imagine you’re shopping in a boutique, looking for your size in a catchy T-shirt — but can’t find it. You may want to ask for the help of a staff member, but there’s no one around. The only thing you can do is leave a note to the store’s representative for later support. However, it seems like taking too much time and effort…

Then you start to wonder: “Do I really want this T-shirt?”

Eventually, you decide to leave without purchasing anything.

This properly happens on your website when you don’t have Live chat. As most customers aren’t willing to wait around for an email response or in a phone queue to get the answer for the product they’re considering, they may leave your store and look elsewhere.

If you are looking for a helpful solution, Live chat is the perfect answer!

Let’s find out what is this communication channel and why it’s so powerful.

What is Live Chat?

Live chat support is a customer service messaging channel that enables shop owners to communicate with visitors on their website via texting. Through this channel, shop owners can provide immediate support and answer customer questions in real-time, which decreases waiting times, improves customer satisfaction, and boost sales.

Distinguish between Live Chat and Chatbots/ AI chat:

Live chat is sometimes confused with chatbots or AI chat; however, the two are totally distinct. Chatbots and AI chats are not manned by an actual person. Instead, they’re programmed to provide assistance menus or recognize particular words and phrases, responding with boilerplate answers to some common pre-listed questions. Live chat offers human-powered customer service in real-time.

How does Live Chat benefit your store?

Helps you reach customers whenever they need

The on-demand nature of the Internet has conditioned us to expect results instantly. That involves responses from a business: when a consumer contacts you with a question or issue, they require a solution as quickly as possible. Through live chat, you can provide customers with prompt and 24/7 support, reducing the probability of them waiting for too long and leaving your site for a competitor’s.

Save time for both your customers and your business

In fact, 51% of customers prefer live chat for their multitasking purposes, and more than 40% feel satisfied because they could get answers right away while continuing their shoppings.

Live chat support is one of the most effective ways to respect your customers’ time. It doesn’t require them to postpone their shopping experiences to get answers. Moreover, they also don’t have to get on the phone or wait for someone to respond to an email. This feature also saves your business time, too. It allows customer service representatives to serve more than one customer at a time, making their work more smooth and efficient.

Gives you a better understanding of visitor’s common concerns

Live chat is a great tool to record live analytics about customer’s common issues and their experience while visiting your website. By monitoring chats regularly, you can have valuable consumer insights and from that create great strategies for the satisfactory resolution of their problems.

With ManySales live chat system, there are reports built-in to help shop owners identify which products are the most problematic, understand customer’s preferences, refine sales and refund policies, etc.

Increase your website conversion with automated triggers

Measuring and understanding the level of engagement of your website visitors is key to boost live chat sales conversions.

Live chat software has a number of features for helping you nurture your online customers and, thus, improve your business. One of those features is the automated trigger, which allows you to track the customer journey and deliver personalized messages to your website visitors.

# Greeting messages: a warm welcome such as “Hi there! Let me know if you need help with anything” is a great way to engage with new customers.

# Welcome back messages: you can capture more leads by sending a personalized chat to returning visitors: “Welcome again! How can I help you today?”.

# Proactive engagement for quick decision making: for instance, if a customer spends more than 3 minutes on the pricing page, send a proactive trigger message to understand if they have any concerns and queries to negotiate a discount.

# Remind cart abandonment: By reaching out at the right time with a friendly reminder “Hey, did you forget something?”, you can prevent website visitors from abandoning the cart and closing the deal you were about to lose.

Get ready to add live chat support?

High-quality service goes beyond simply providing correct answers into understanding what a consumer is trying to attain and helping them get it done. Live chat support can speed up that process by allowing you to have real-time support to your prospective customers.

With ManySales system, you can create a live chat campaign and run it effortlessly! Don’t believe it? Check out the guidelines on how to add effective Live Chat on your eCommerce website!

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Flowio

Flowio provides an all-in-one solution that helps you capture more leads with Pop-ups, send personalized Emails & SMS campaigns, and connect with customers 24/7