Live chat is growing in popularity. According to a recent report from Software Advice, almost half of the survey respondents prefer using live chat for online shopping queries. A good news for any of you who has wisely installed live chat support on your eCommerce site.

But don’t be too giddy just yet. Though live chat can noticeably improve your online customer service, its benefit on increasing conversions and sales cannot be reflected that quickly, especially when you just “sit and stare”.

Your online chat is showing no sign of drawing in more coins? Below are 7 improvements you can work on to turn your live chat support into a real “money maker”.

1. Tailored suggestions

Giving personalized advice is a great way to nudge a potential customer towards better choices and increase the chance of buying. By simply dissecting visitor’s chat history and on-site activity, agents can easily make out their shopping preference and suggest the perfect item before they even think about it. Who wouldn’t love an attentive customer rep like that?

To deliver such well-tuned service, shop owners should make sure their agents are well trained about product knowledge and always get prompt update on the latest deals or promotional campaigns. That way, they can give out proper cross-sell/up-sell offer as well as make your online chat sound more human and trustworthy.

2. Timely chat invitations

Selling is not all about offering the right thing. It’s about the art of doing it at the right time as well. Who wouldn’t hate a discourteous chat agent that pops up in your face with some complex discount rules when you’ve just landed on the homepage and have yet no idea about their product line?

A wise agent is the one who picks up the right moment to step in and say hello before nudging a prospect along the sales funnel. It can be when a visitor is browsing between two products and can not seem to decide on either item or when he is struggling on the support page and has yet settled on a desired contact method.

Chat agents can set up smart triggers to send out automatic greetings under perfectly predefined conditions like those to be more helpful and increase sales along the way. Try Subiz live chat solution for free to have a better understanding of how triggers work.

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3. Good Call to Action

The default chat button with the “Chat Now” call to action is so classic and boring. It is not incentive enough to get people click. And how are you going to grow your sales if potential customers don’t even bother to talk to you?

Let’s think about customizing your chat call to action as how you do your marketing materials’ wording. To pique initial interest, choose the words carefully, considering the nature of your product/service. If you are selling clothes, shoes or other fashion accessories, how about replacing “Chat Now” with “Ask for May lookbook” or “What’s trending?”. If you are selling website templates or other digital artwork, a “Get me freebie designs” button in the chat widget would draw more attention.

4. Customized chat window

Apart from a good call to action, a well-designed chat window also encourages more chat engagement and sales. If the widget fits in well with the whole look and feel of your e-store, it does not only look good to the eyes but also get you more trust. Never be tempted to make your chat window obtrusive or stand out too much. People have to take time to question its credibility and may mistake it for some annoying third-party pop up ads.

A great way to fine-tune your chat widget is to look into your site’s mainstream color, brand/logo color, typography and customize the chat window’s text and color to make it blend in nicely with other occupants of your site.

5. Be multilingual

There’s no greater way to impress your customers than speaking their languages. If your customer base spreads across the globe, it’s best to hire local agents to deal with local customers. In case your budget does not allow, it’s alright to make do with “greetings in their language”. All you need to do is turning on the auto detect language mode in your live chat tool. Language on your chat widget’s front-end will then be adjusted automatically according to the country location of each visitor.

It’s also advisable to integrate Google translate API or other similar translate services into your live chat for more effective communication. (Subiz supports you in chatting on chat widget with 6 languages now)

6. Avoid abandoned carts

For many reasons, some customers opt out during the checkout process and leave their carts un-paid. It can be unintentional due to wrong click or bad connection. But people may also click away on purpose when they find something fishy or unclear about the shipping method, payment gateway or refund policy, etc. A chat agent’s job is to jump right in and save this potential sales. How?

From the chat report, one can find out the average amount of time it takes for their customers to finish a purchase. Let’s set a trigger to send chat greetings to anyone taking more than that time to ask for their problem and help them through the purchase.

7. Record customer response

Good products bring about good money. People may come in for low price but they are sure to come back for good quality. To improve your product/service quality, customer feedback is the valuable source of inputs. Why not set up a trigger so that every time an old customer come back to your e-store, a greeting pops up to kindly ask them for doing some survey? And don’t forget to send them something (e.g., a coupon code) as a thank you gift later.

Have you applied any of the above techniques to your live chat system? How is the result? Just comment below. May be we can come up with much better ideas!