Live Chat is becoming one of the most powerful tools for online customer service. If your eCommerce is still not using it, you might want to take a closer look at your strategy.
With Black Friday right around the corner, businesses are looking for new methods to make them a crowd favorite. In other words, they want to get all the attention, increase their conversions, and make peers “eat dust.”
To make this happen, they are betting big on live chat tools. With them, communication becomes easier and more accessible to consumers. They can use it while also performing other tasks and the conversation with an actual person makes live chats a customer preference.
Of course, these are only two among many other aspects that make this type of chat so popular. However, even though it has grown over the years, most companies still use it mainly for customer support. However, it goes way beyond that. Live Chat can also be used for marketing and sales.
How Live Chat can impact your business
That being said, you can already imagine how it will impact your entire company. If you use it the right way, you’ll see results coming quickly.
Nonetheless, it’s more than increasing sales and revenue, a Live Chat is a tool to assist in building your brand in the market. For instance, you can add value to your product and brand by having a personalized conversation.
People don’t want scripted messages that make you sound like a robot. That’s the whole point of acquiring this tool: bring a human agent to the formula.
Moreover, a Live Chat will show you a wide variety of benefits and it can indeed improve your business outcomes.
We can prove it:
Live Chat statistics you need to know
Is there something that makes us more convinced than numbers and facts?
For this reason, we brought here some of the main Live Chat statistics that will show you just how important it is.
Customer support and satisfaction
Since customer support is one of the main reasons companies acquire this tool, let’s start by evaluating some data on it. In addition, we’ll be looking into customer satisfaction levels as well.
- While emails get 61% of customer satisfied, and phone support 44%, the Live Chat gets up to 73% of customers satisfied.
- 63% of customers said they are more likely to return to a website if Live Chat is available.
- 83.1% is the average customer satisfaction rate globally with Live Chat.
Even more than that, when asked what about Live Chat that made them so pleased with the service
- 79% of customers said they like this type of chat because of the instant messages
- 51% said it was because they can multitask
- 46% affirmed it’s the most efficient method for support and overall online services
Lead generation & Conversion rates
Brands can use live chats with the purpose of increasing their conversions. As a matter of fact, with Black Friday getting closer, it has been brought up as a strategy eCommerce should use to improve their businesses.
So, what do researchers say about the topic? First of all:
- The dominant number here is 40%, which is the increase in conversions a brand can have by using Live Chat
Then, we have some info on lead generation that is super valuable:
- Even if a customer doesn’t use the live chat feature right away, 63% of them are more likely to return to the website because of it
- Proactive chats, initiated by the company, had an optimistic result of 94% of customers satisfied with the experience
- From all consumers that had a live chat session, 38% of them purchased because of the conversation they had
- In general, 85% is the average possibility of chatters becoming customers. This means that from each visitor that uses your Live Chat solution, they are 85% more likely to buy something than the ones who don’t have a session
Customer experience and engagement
When it comes to customer experience, we can imagine that it will be good once we’ve seen how satisfied most people are with the Live Chat feature. Still, there are numbers related to this matter that are quite impressive too:
- In order to have a better CX, 80% of consumers said they would pay more for a product
- On the same note, 49% of customers already experience bad CX and decided to change companies because of it
What about customer engagement? What does that even mean when we’re talking about live chat? Well, it’s mostly an expression to elucidate the expectation of the consumer regarding the relationship (and experience) they will have.
For example:
- You should always offer a service with sales reps since 40% of customers want the help of someone to attend their needs faster than they would do it alone
Moreover, some facts that you should know on the subject are that:
- The main reason for customers to change brands while making a purchase is because of service-related problems
- On average, when customers are pleased with your service, they share a positive experience with about 11 people
Revenue stats
Obviously, while live chat increases conversions, it also has an impact on your business’s revenue. This is what we’re talking about:
- A 48% increase in revenue can happen per chat hour
- Companies that offer live chats are more likely to have returning customers, in fact, 51% of consumers said they would come back to repurchase when an eCommerce offers this feature
In addition, you should also have an idea of how many businesses are using live chat for sales purposes, and that is:
- Most B2B businesses, a total of 85%, use this tool for sales
- In a similar statistic, but regarding B2C businesses, 74% of these use live chat for sales
Furthermore, Live Chat is mainly used for customer support:
- 66% of B2B businesses use it for this reason
- 67% of B2C companies have Live Chat for supporting customers
Response time
It’s common to see response time as a benefit and/or differential of the Live Chat, so we had to bring some statistics about this issue too. Curiously, response time is not the preference of most customers. Check this out:
- While you might think that fast answers are a must, 95% of customers said they prefer high-quality service over speed
- At the same time, 59% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when they get answered in under 1 minute
This information is really useful so you can come up with a Live Chat strategy for your company. And here are two more to complement your data:
- Long waits make 24% of customers frustrated
- There is a number of chats that end up unanswered when customer-initiated, a total of 16%, and the reasons for abandonment can vary from a long wait to a bad customer service
Live Chat vs. Chatbot
With the rise of live chats operated by human agents, a “war” seems to have started between this eCommerce feature and the already popular chatbots. Both tools are used for the same purposes. The main difference is the one we’re mentioning here: you talk directly to a real person in a live chat.
To help you make a decision between live chat and chatbot, here are some facts:
- 67% of customers have already used a chatbot to get customer support in an eCommerce
- Up to 80% of routine questions (that is, questions that are frequently asked by customers) can be answered by a chatbot
Additionally, some chatbots are built with AI technology. This means the more they attend clients, the more they will learn and perform better. They are also easily scalable, can answer multiple customers instantly and at once. Overall, they deliver a great customer experience.
On the other hand:
- Many consumers prefer to be attended by live agents than by a chatbot, even if they are AI bots. The magic number: 70% of customers said they like a Live Chat better
That says a lot, right? Even though businesses can reduce their costs by around 30% with a chatbot, Live Chat is a tool that will give you a competitive advantage. Moreover, Live Chat is a low-cost solution and the ROI is excellent.
The future of Live Chat
According to these facts and statistics, it’s possible to notice some trends and understand how Live Chat will grow and be used from now on. In 2020, we can already see that:
- 85% of customer support activity happens without a human agent, in other words, through chatbots
- However, 71% of businesses believe that Live Chat will become the main channel of communication by 2021
Further on, an interesting fact is that:
- 62% of customers expect live chat for mobile, which means that this feature will most likely be optimized for that
In addition, nowadays the results are great, proof of that is:
- After one year of using Live Chat, 43% of businesses said they had a better understanding of their consumer
- Meanwhile, 79% of businesses reported they had positive influences on sales, revenue, and customer loyalty because of the Live Chat tool
We can conclude that this tool is more than a simple feature, it’s a powerful weapon to make your eCommerce thrive by increasing conversions and revenue through live conversations.
Biggest trends for 2020 Black Friday
The year 2020 came with a huge impact on the business model of many retail stores. Because of the pandemic, eCommerce became even more popular, and not only people but several brands had to adapt to this “new normal” situation.
Now that Black Friday is near, everyone’s started to wonder how things would work this year.
All in all, there are some trends this year that might not have gained attention previously, but the truth is, eCommerce has been a huge hit on Black Friday for a few years. The difference now is that there are more people going online for their purchases, so there’s the need to offer better customer service and experience.
That’s why the first trend we’re talking about here is the attention to the customer journey. On average, people start to search for products and offers about 6 weeks before Black Friday day itself.
So, that’s also about the time you should start presenting campaigns and special offers to make the customer start their journey early and work their decision to purchase throughout this time.
Because of that, it’s also expected that sales will start earlier this year as well as they will last longer. Some brands are thinking about starting right after Halloween, but there are some planning to launch campaigns even prior to that.
It’s really up to each strategy and how your company will work to achieve goals for the Black Friday event.
Still in that matter, stores are thinking about longer sales. But what does that mean?
Since retailers will have an early start, there’s no reason to end offers before the day of Black Friday, unless products go out of stock. Thus, we will see products on sale for a longer period of time.
However, something that is likely to happen a lot this year are flash sales. In other words, it’s a type of sale where companies offer a limited special offer for their consumers. A notification is sent a few days ahead and people can only buy during a shorter period of time.
Remember when we said 62% of customers expect Live Chat to be optimized for mobile?
Well, on the same note, customers mainly do their online shopping through mobile. For that reason, many brands are adopting mobile-only offers. That is, communicate offers and deals through SMS or notifications, for example, allowing consumers to buy straight from the link you sent.
An incentive some brands are working on this year is free shipping. Since many people suffered a negative economic impact due to the pandemic, it might be a necessary provocation to make them buy during the Black Friday period. Therefore, free shipping costs are being highly adopted this year.
Get ready for Black Friday with a Live Chat
All of Black Friday trends can do even better if you use a live chat tool on your website. You can use it to proactively answer customers’ questions, initiating the chat with an offer they can’t miss.
If you want to help your eCommerce achieve its goals, this is the way to go. Increase your conversions by acquiring the Arena Live Chat – you can try it for free NOW!
