How to increase sales with live chat and chatbots

Live chat is a marketing tool with two goals – to communicate effectively and to sell. A multifunctional assistant in your online store: always at hand, ready to advise and help. Real success, though, comes only with suitable, good quality communication, ideally with a wow effect on top.

In this article you will learn:

• how to be better than your competition thanks to live chat

• what a good live chat tool should be able to do

• why it is important to answer within a few seconds

• by how many per cent live chat can raise your conversion rate

In Czechia and across Europe the market is dominated by Smartsupp. We are also the most used live chat tool on several platforms. Take a look at the platforms we support. Many of the features that will move your store forward are available to you in the free version.

If you want to sell, stand out and be special

The situation on the market today is tough – strong competition and an endless supply of all kinds of goods. To succeed you have to offer not only perfect services but also top class customer service. Communication plays the main role in all of that, and live chat can help you considerably.

People took to this modern way of communicating quickly. The key to a customer choosing you is to use all the knowledge and tools better than your competition does.

Store owners answer 80 % of the chats created in Smartsupp within one minute at best. That is not entirely a reason to celebrate, because while they wait, the customer can order the same goods from a competing store and leave your site.

Make sure you answer on live chat right away, ideally within a few seconds. When you manage that, you not only multiply the chance of a new order, you also look genuinely top in the eyes of your customers. At the same time you are effectively supporting your brand.

What will make the road to those results easier? Simply a chatbot, automatic messages and, for manually sent messages, shortcuts, which we will come to shortly. You can of course combine all of it. Let us look at the individual options more closely.

A chatbot answers for you whether you are online or not

Chatbots are an invaluable helper in communicating with customers. They take care of frequent and repeated questions completely automatically, or they help customers choose the right goods. The more questions you prepare them for, the more time you gain for more complex conversations and more important work. On top of that they answer immediately and around the clock. We also devoted an article to chatbots focused on their use in marketing. If you have the time, give it a moment so that you know how to use them to the full.

According to studies, a properly set up chatbot can raise the conversion rate by up to 38 %. Still no chatbot on your site? Do not miss the boat and try one right away.

An automatic message can keep the customer on your site

We are all only human and it happens to everyone. Prepare for the situations where you do not manage to answer the customer yourself. Do not leave them waiting longer than a few dozen seconds. Set up an automatic message that is sent to the other side if you do not join the chat within a set time.

If you know you are busy and will not keep up, set one up as well. Apologise for the situation in it and ask the visitor for patience. Do not forget to say in the text when you will answer or what the next step is – for example that they can call you. Take care over the text; it should exceed the customer's expectations.

Dan Višňák from the store x-trenink.cz uses automatic messages to send a greeting immediately after a visitor starts a chat. That creates the impression that someone is already attending to the conversation, so the customer quite automatically stays connected in the chat on your site and waits for the next messages you send.

In this case it is important to actually respond to the question afterwards, or to cover the situation where that does not happen for some reason with another automatic message. In that one you can ask the other side for an email address, for example. That way you do not lose the ability to send the customer your message even once they have left your site.

Shortcuts save you a lot of time answering similar questions

So that you do not have to answer frequently repeated questions over and over, set up a shortcut in Smartsupp. You can call it up at any time in literally two clicks. In every conversation, using this feature saves you time and as a result you answer that much faster.

You can preset shortcuts with any text you often send to people. That way you easily create much longer, more detailed and better content. The speed at which you can then fire it off thanks to shortcuts will impress your customers. They will remember you as the great store where the staff always help in a flash.

Tip: do people ask you about the differences between various categories or product types? Prepare a shortcut with a perfect, detailed explanation that you can send in no time, every time. Watch how surprised everyone will be.

And what if I am offline?

Of course it is not realistic to sit at the chat 24 hours a day. But you can work with it very well even when you are offline. In Smartsupp it is enough to switch on the authorisation form. If you are not available, it will collect an email address from customers with every new conversation. When you log in again in the morning and answer the questions, your reply lands in the users' inboxes.

Even here, though, a chatbot can show what it can do, because it never needs to sleep. If your visitor has a simple question, you will not even know about it, because the bot takes the whole thing off your hands.

Save time by connecting more channels as well

Besides the shortcuts and chatbots already mentioned, connecting different communication channels will help you too. From a single place you easily handle questions from the site as well as from Facebook Messenger, for example. For customers with an email you can send replies straight to their mail client, which comes in handy when someone disconnects during a conversation.

You do not have to check Facebook separately and the live chat on the site separately, constantly switching between tabs in your browser. When you are looking for a conversation with a specific person, you do not have to work out where it actually took place.

All of these are small things that in the end save you a lot of time and make your communication fast, comfortable and effective.

Try the fastest growing live chat right now

Launching Smartsupp in your store will not take you more than a few seconds. Simply add the plugin to your site. Then just create an account and that is it.

You can start winning new satisfied customers and at the same time build a great name for yourself by communicating differently from the competition and making full use of the advantages of live chat. On top of that, Smartsupp offers the key features in a version that is completely free.