Chatting As a Way of Fostering Business Rapports with Your Customers

As an eCommerce business relying on the assistance of live chat and customer experience you have visitors coming to your site initiating a conversation about your products or services.

But not everyone that begins a chat is a would-be buyer or customer. Sometimes, staff from your live chat service company may visit your website and enter a conversation as well.

But what for? You may be wondering.

Well, while they may not be visiting to buy your products or subscribe to your services, their visit may be as important as any other. At Help on Click, we visit eCommerce merchants using our chat feature to gain insights on live chat and customer experience and assist them in using our services better.

In essence, we allow them the chance to ask questions they’ve never had the opportunity to ask.

Why do We chat With Our Customers?

Well, we realized that it is an excellent tactic to get their attention and seek feedback about their experience with our chat feature and address their pain points.

As any other company would do, we send useful instructional emails and surveys, seeking the customer’s feedback and recommending different services or products. But we’ve come to realize that using our live chat for business to address their concerns is the best way to show its capabilities.

In other words, we are like a rare visitor who comes to help you improve your business for the better.

For us, conversing through chat is central to cultivating healthy business rapports with customers. So before we start a chat, we set a goal— we make clear what we intend to achieve with the conversation. For example:

  1. Create relationships with new companies – Starting conversations with our new customers through the chat feature is a pleasant surprise. It sets the foundation of a lasting business rapport.

We noticed that our new customers have many questions about our product. So we made our minds to reach out to them and make work easier instead of waiting for them to come to our website and seek assistance from our agents.

  1. Increase satisfaction – To us, nothing matters that having a happy customer base. No wonder we are always out seeking for honest feedback about our product.
  2. Upsell – We approach our long term customers to chat about our live chat product, and use this opportunity to suggest more advanced features and explain how it can improve their bottom lines.

At the end of the day, our goal is to increase to provide valuable assistance to our customers. And while we may not always achieve some of the above goals right of the bat, we always count every chat as a win because we understand that customers want to feel supported.

We also know that for a new ecommerce business, nothing can be annoying like adding a new chat feature that you understand nothing about and having no one to give guidance on how to use it let alone tap into its hidden benefits.

How Our Customers React When we Approach them on Chat

At Help on Click, we have many other errands to run rather than sit and chat all day long with customers about live chat and customer experience.

That is to say; we always make every visit count. We love to reach out when we have a pressing (very urgent) or important matter to put across. Or when it is more appropriate to address the issue through live chat for business than make a phone call or send an email.

Proper timing and catchy agendas ensure we always receive a positive reaction from our customers. Add to the surprise of having a service provider come to you, and the surprise is just worth it. Most of the responses we receive from our customers are cheerful and positive (sometimes the responses beat our expectations).

In some cases, this kind of engagement may sound fishy or look invasive to a customer, but thanks to live chat itself, we can always regain a customer’s trust and get them accustomed to this kind of communication. We strive to win!

Context is key

To our in-house team, the use and configuration of our live chat for the business tool may be common place. But a customer who has only seen it a couple of times may find it quite complex to use, and we keep that in mind when collecting feedback from them.

That’s why we do not have canned replies to address different issues; instead, we take time to create a detailed response depending on the customer’s needs.

How Chatting Helps Us Win Customers Over

Background checks

We realized the benefits of chat are more apparent when you are addressing the growing pains of a customer.  So we spend quality time carrying out background checks on a customer before we approach them with a pre-determined goal in mind.

It came clear to us that we could give more relevant suggestions and ask more personal questions if we studied our customers before initiating chats.

For instance, it makes more sense to advise a customer in a sector that needs 24/7 live chat services about “how to stay live round the clock” than to start this kind of conversation with an eCommerce merchant who cares less about being around 24/7.

A Strong Intro

We make the chat catchy and difficult to ignore from the word go. Remember, the goal is to capture the attention of a customer and engage them in a productive conversation.

We don’t approach customers with basic questions because we realized it makes them abandon chats quickly. So we insist o starting our conversations with a topic they really want to discuss.

Conclusion.

Do you admire our live chat and customer experience approach? Well, the truth is this kind of engagement is possible in nearly any industry or type of business you run online.

All you have to do is to know your customers and target each of them personally. That way, you can never go wrong any time you reach out to talk to them about their pain points or to suggest better features or new products.