Live Chat and Keeping Your Freedom with Shopify

Most business owners need to have independence all the while minding their eCommerce stores, and at times customers have needs at the most inconvenient times. Most small operations have to run lean on costs and staffing, thus using some level of automation and “tech” to bridge the gap, can be a crucial tool to get organised with. Providing that personal online touch in assisting customers can make a conversions improve significantly.

Here is the top 3 Shopify Apps to consider

WhatsApp Chat

There are two variants and both are highly rated as Shopify Apps in the Apps store. The first is the Live Chat, the other is Cart Recovery – both have a free plan available, and key in conversion and customer experience.

Tidio Live Chat

Add marketing automation and chatbots to engage with visitors. This additional tech helps get clients to click and take the first step in asking a question and filtering easy questions that already have been added to FAQ’s vs the personal human required responses. Adding efficiency in information dissemination.

Facebook Chat Box

Bringing in Social media to the interactive experience is only natural. Making it seamless to the clients thinking that they are in Facebook chat and interacting within that channel.

Considering these various methods, it allows you to respond to customers right on your phone while you are out and about. Integrating these into your Shopify store is easy, and their free plans are all scalable if you see them work well for your lifestyle.

Your availability during peak demand

Every business has seasonality, traffic peaks and holiday/promotional days, which will need to be considered to plan for having the availability of staffing chat responders. Google analytics can easily give you the trending data, as well as Shopify has its analytics tool.

A dedicated and trained individual can support and chat with up to 5 or so clients during peak times. A trained individual is knowledgeable about your products/services, but also knows how to filter through time-wasters vs. productive chats. Over time, the peak times will become apparent, and can be worked within schedules.

Chatbox view control

Your ability to control your “click to chat” box is important to prioritise and filter the right client at the right time while they are in the marketing funnel.

Setting the rules on how to make the chat appear usually takes the following path:

• Hide the chatbox across the whole site and have these exception rules.
• Important decision making steps in your store such as Shopping cart view, entering information for a product (upload a graphic for a T-shirt), or any steps that could confuse or frustrate a client.
• New Products/Services are a great place to further elaborate and engage clients with.
• IP location and language filtering. If you can only chat and support in English, then restrict the tool to only English speaking countries as an example.
• Email promotion, advertising or landing page campaigns can be focused on with the chatbox to appear when those clients arrive to reduce the bounce rate.

Working with your Shopify developer/designer can greatly assist with the right tool for the right business setup so to integrate your chatbox appropriately.

Controlling Sessions

The ability to handle multiple chat sessions is feasible with a well-trained operative, yet that might still exceed their abilities at a certain amount of simultaneous sessions. Your tool should be able to limit and hide the chatbox from view when they are engaged in “X” number of chats. Once one is closed out, then the chatbox will re-appear in the designated areas of the Shopify store.

Combining AI with chat sessions like Tidio can assist greatly in this situation where the AI can reduce the load by answering pre-recognised questions, and filter the customer past the FAQ’s before they are in queue with a person.

Lastly a pre-chat survey to see who is really serious about engaging with your Shopify store asking them for their name and their question before connecting with you can enhance the quality of leads needing your attention.

Summary With millions of online stores where few are manned behind the scenes, your client’s confidence in purchasing and closing a sale is greatly enhanced when you know there is someone available to talk to. Following up on an order, or have additional questions gives the client peace of mind and goes as far as telling friends or writing a positive review. With Shopify’s easy-to-implement Apps, getting Live Chat installed and configured is straight forward with a solid upside to your conversion to go with it.