Why your live chat needs visual support to offer outstanding customer service

Offering excellent customer service is mandatory in every business. Despite the product or service you sell in your e-commerce business, despite how much you optimize the UX of your web, and despite how clear your shipping and return policies are written, there will always be a user that needs help.

Offering personalized assistance translates to increased sales and trust among your website users. E-commerce must have as many channels as possible to interact and engage with its customers to impact its conversion.

Nowadays, every online shop offers contact via mail, phone, and social media. These channels are useful not only to gain more followers and build a community around the brand; they are often used to help customers. Users don't like to waste time on the phone or waiting to receive an answer by email; they want an immediate response.

To solve this need, live chat is definitely the best option. Not having this kind of tool means raising a barrier between your shop and your customers, which translates into offering a negative customer experience and purchase process. In fact, if we don't provide answers in real-time, we could lose sales.

However, not every chat is capable of solving this issue, if what we are looking to gain with a live chat is increasing conversion. In fact, the majority of standard chats are not visual. Meaning they don't help to facilitate communication between agents and clients.

What does visual customer service mean?

Having a live chat available in our e-commerce business is offering immediacy. But to personalize it, like in a physical store, we need to break the visual barrier.

Oct8ne's visual support fixes this problem. We have already talked about this software as one of the top 10 chats of 2020. Oct8ne's team has proved how breaking the barrier between offline and online and making the online experience similar to the face-to-face experience increases conversions.

To reproduce the offline experience, communicating in real-time is not enough; agents and customers need to see the same at the same time.

Agents and customers not only need to be able to communicate in real-time, but they also need to see the same on the screen to understand each other without issue.

Imagine a client who is reaching out because he's got doubts or because he's looking for a specific product. He would have to ask a very clear question or describe the specifics of the product he is looking for meticulously for the agent to understand. If the agent doesn't understand, the conversation may become too lengthy and frustrating for the customer, without considering that the agent might not suggest the correct product.

A piece of data worth considering is that about 65% of online buyers have abandoned their cart because the agent couldn't solve his or her doubts. This is what Oct8ne aims to fix.

Thanks to a coviewer, the visual support of this live chat, agent and customer can see the same thing simultaneously. Oct8ne allows you to share images and videos of products and interact with them while chatting. Both agents and customers can show products and see them in real-time, zoom in on the image, or highlight details.

But my e-commerce needs a chatbot

Artificial Intelligence is the ultimate e-commerce trend, mostly because it represents a great option to improve the productivity of any business. Especially for online sales, considering that a chatbot can answer clients' queries, facilitating the agent's work.

However, in this chatbot boom, we must be aware of what they can do for e-commerce and why we need them: Installing a bot does not mean offering 24-hour customer service and assuming that everything will work automatically.

In e-commerce, you need to personalize the shopping experience and, although chatbots can

simulate fluent conversations and use natural language, serving a customer is not as easy as asking a question and getting an answer.

Oct8ne's chatbot aims to be strong support for customer service. Still, it doesn't pretend to substitute humans: a chatbot must answer frequent questions, so agents can focus on offering personalized advice to potential customers and provide a great customer experience.

Through the bot, we can answer most FAQ's. This way, the bot is like a filter that detects those clients who need personalized assistance. Therefore, customer service has more time to guide a customer who's having issues with checkout, implement upselling and cross-selling techniques, with the aim of increasing sales.

Oct8ne's chatbot is totally integrated with the live chat to automatically answer in one second, understanding natural language in different languages and transferring queries to an agent when necessary.

Moreover, you can choose between two bot types for your e-commerce: an AI bot that simulates a real conversation with the customer or a conversational bot that will guide the customer toward the product he or she is looking for through a flow of questions/answers.

Oct8ne can answer 35% of the questions asked in any online store thanks to its bot system. And so, the experience of a doubtful client improves because, before needing an agent, he or she has been attended to.

The bot makes users more satisfied, and most importantly, agents spend an average of three more minutes on customers who really need human assistance, increasing sales opportunities.

This article was previously published in Cross-Border Magazine 15.