Customers need advice after working hours too – how do you avoid losing them?
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If a customer has an urgent question they cannot find an answer to, cannot get through on the company's phone number and nobody is on chat, they essentially have only 3 options:
They leave the purchase for later, which in practice often means they postpone it indefinitely and never come back at all.
They order without the information they need, which significantly increases the risk of choosing the wrong goods – leading to returns and later to complaints as well.
They go to a competitor who will advise them. Probably the worst (but quite likely) scenario. All it takes to leave for a competitor is two clicks.
One option better than the other, right? But what can be done about it?
From the customer's point of view it would of course be ideal if every store had a human operator available 24/7. In terms of cost, however, such a model does not make economic sense for most online stores.
A solution does exist all the same. It is chatbots, and the best of them can resolve up to 80% of questions thanks to artificial intelligence. And in the remaining 20% they at least gather information that lets an operator deal with the question the very next day.
This is what the opening message of a classic chatbot looks like on the Dekorativni-omitka.cz online store.
Only a third of orders are placed during working hours
Did you know that more than 60% of orders are placed outside working hours?
According to our study of chatbots and live chat for 2023, customers also ask 21.3% of their questions at the weekend. Most online stores, however, only have customer support covered on working days from 9 to 17, which is just 40 of the 168 hours in a week.
Yet communication with an online store is crucial for most customers. In a 2022 survey by Salesforce:
48% of customers said they had switched to another brand because of the quality of customer care.
94% of customers said that good service is a key factor in whether they buy from an online store again.
On top of that you have to add another important thing – no website visitor is free. Whether they were brought to your online store by your brand's organic reach (which you spent a lot of time and money building) or by paid advertising, every new website visitor costs a fair amount of money. If they leave the site without buying, winning them back is not easy.
Response speed matters too
Besides the availability of support, its speed also matters to customers. According to the experience of AAA AUTO, which uses Smartsupp products, a customer who does not get a reply to their opening message within 30 seconds usually leaves the chat.
That is confirmed, for example, by a 2021 Forrester study in which 47% of online store customers state that if they do not get a fast reply, they usually leave the site.
A chatbot advises customers on their purchase 24/7
As we said at the beginning, chatbots can be the way out of this difficult situation. Their main advantage is that they work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They do not need to sleep or rest at the weekend, so they can attend to your customers' questions even at midnight on a Sunday.
Chatbots can easily handle questions concerning:
The rules for withdrawing from a contract, returning goods and making complaints.
Information about shipping and payment methods.
The benefits of individual products (including comparing them), complementary goods and the services you offer.
Hand on heart – what percentage of the questions on your online store falls into one of these categories? More advanced chatbots using artificial intelligence, such as our new Mira AI shopping assistant, can resolve up to 80% of questions on their own, which gives customer service the room to focus fully on the 20% most complicated questions.
Chatbots represent a significant cost saving for small online stores too. For many of them it does not make economic sense to employ full-time customer support, or they have to hire extra staff during the main selling season. Compared with those alternatives a chatbot is incomparably cheaper, and on top of that it can easily answer any number of questions at once.
This is what the Mira AI shopping assistant looks like on the andyhoauto.sk online store.
While with an ordinary chatbot you have to create a decision tree in which you define the answers to each question separately, Mira AI works differently. It draws the data for its answers from the information given on the online store and from your product catalogue. Thanks to that it can answer most of your customers' common questions in a personalised way, compare and recommend suitable products and support cross-sell and up-sell.
Having a chatbot on your site has another fundamental benefit – you show customers that you care about them and are trying to accommodate them. Thanks to the mere presence of a chatbot on the site, the customer knows that even if you are not available at the moment, you are trying to deal with their question and will get in touch personally the next working day if needed.
Chatbot results in numbers
In most cases chatbots do not replace human support, but work alongside it. In practice that means the online store uses a combination of live chat and chatbots. That gives customers the best of both worlds – fast and efficient automated support when they need it, and at the same time access to a human expert when that is essential.
Live chat also lets operators pick up a conversation started by a chatbot, which means the customer does not have to explain their problem again. That increases not only efficiency, but customer satisfaction as well.
And the results of Smartsupp clients from our case studies speak for themselves:
ASKO - NÁBYTEK: Chat generates enquiries worth CZK 1.1 million a month and the chatbot gains 600 new email contacts a month.
AAA Auto: Thanks to an AI chatbot reaching out to visitors and to live chat, the company sells 900 extra cars a month and gains 7,200 new email contacts a month.
Breno: The combination of chatbots and live chat increased total revenue by 10.8%. The average order value of a customer who used the help of a chatbot or live chat is 30% higher than the average. The customer satisfaction rating is 98%.
inSPORTline: Smartsupp products increased the company's sales by 9.7%. The conversion rate among customers who chatted with the chatbot or with customer support is 10.3%.
Even though these examples might make it seem that chatbots only help large online stores, that is not the case. With Smartsupp you can choose a package so that you pay only for the conversations you actually use.
For small online stores chatbots will therefore mean a considerably lower cost. The impact of chatbots on revenue can often be much higher in percentage terms for small and medium-sized online stores than for the large ones.
An example is the case study of the Dokonalakava.cz online store, where the chatbot helps handle around 150 conversations a month. The average order value in conversations that no human took part in at all grew by 150% – considerably more than in most large online stores. Among visitors helped by the chatbot there was also a 248% increase in the conversion rate. In practice that means that a mere 0.5% of customers who communicated with the chatbot made up 5% of total turnover.
Deploying a chatbot on your site – everything you need to know
Getting your own chatbot is neither expensive, complicated nor time-consuming. Let us look together at the most frequent questions and concerns that come up when deploying chatbots.
How do I set up a Smartsupp account? Setting up a Smartsupp account is quick and easy. All you have to do is click the Create a free account tab on our website and then click the Try for free button. Fill in your email address, choose a password, or alternatively you can register through Google or Facebook. After registering you will receive a confirmation email – clicking the link activates the account. Once your account is ready, you can move on to integrating the chat widget on your website.
If you use Shoptet, the Smartsupp+ add-on lets you connect your account with your online store right when you create it. In the Shoptet administration go to Connections, Add-on manager and then click Go to Shoptet add-ons. There, find the Smartsupp+ add-on and install it. Then create a Smartsupp account for free, or log in to an existing one.
How long does it take to deploy a chatbot or an AI shopping assistant? The Mira AI shopping assistant from Smartsupp is designed as a simple plug-and-play solution. In practice that means integrating it with your online store is really simple and takes no longer than 5 minutes.
Creating a decision tree for an ordinary chatbot takes a little longer. You have to write the answers to the various questions manually. Even so it is nothing complicated – thanks to ready-made templates you can have your own chatbot finished in a few hours at most.
What do I need to prepare before deploying a chatbot? In the case of the Mira AI shopping assistant you have to provide data either through the URL of your website, where it gets information by web scraping, or from the data in your product feed. Thanks to that it will have all the information about the products you offer.
To create a classic chatbot you will need only one thing – to know your products and your business well. The answers the chatbot gives have to be put into a prepared template (which can, however, be customised).
Can the AI shopping assistant be used on its own without other features? Yes, Mira AI can be used as a standalone product – without buying other packages and services. All you have to do is set up a Smartsupp account in the free version and activate the AI shopping assistant, which you can try out on your website for free. You then choose one of the packages for Mira AI, which includes a monthly conversation limit that resets every month.
Do I need to train the customer support team when using a chatbot? No complicated training is needed, especially if the team is already used to working with a live chat application. Operators basically just need to be shown how to view the previous communication with the chatbot.
How soon can I expect the first results? As soon as you launch the chatbot you can follow its answers in real time. Whether you go for an ordinary chatbot or the AI shopping assistant, you will see the impact on revenue the same day. So if you launch the chatbot in the morning, you can analyse in the evening how its work affected your customer support and your sales.
We prepared this article in cooperation with Shoptet University
This article was created in cooperation with Shoptet, the largest platform for building and managing online stores in the Czech Republic, which powers more than 30,000 online stores.
If you would like more inspiration on how to improve your business, visit Shoptet University. Besides this article you will find plenty of other useful information, practical guides and tips there that will help you grow.