Chat Them Up! How To Win Customers Over With Chat Bots
If there’s a time to integrate a chat feature on your online business or site, it’s now. People have a whole new set of customer service requests regarding policies and product handling during the mandatory stay-at-home order. It’s important to offer digital support in the most effective way possible. Chat bots are a great way to set up automated responses to frequently asked questions (since over 40% of customer service requests are FAQs). Or you can use them to direct your customers to a live chat with an agent.
Chat bot usage has seen massive increases since 2017. And for good reason. People are much more willing to have a conversation through a chat/messenger app than to deal with customer service in person or on the phone. Research shows over 80% of people would rather text businesses than call them for support. Everyone has experience communicating through a digital chat, and over 50% of mobile ecommerce shoppers expect your online store to have a chat feature. If your online business still doesn’t have one, you can potentially be cutting yourself off from your consumers.
Below we will cover four different chat apps you can install on your site to ramp up your customer service. The first two of the apps you can directly download from Shopify, the other two are easily integrated with Shopify or another platform.
Gorgias
$60/month
Gorgias is a great live chat app that you can easily download from the Shopify app store. With 4.9/5 stars and 343 reviews, it’s a popular choice amongst online retailers. Not only is it a powerful chat tool, it also manages conversations from the email and phone directly from the Gorgias help desk. It allows you to keep all your open tickets organized and pull up the customer support history for each customer for effective support. You can choose to either have a live chat with the customer or automate responses through triggers. You can also select and pre-made templates for instant responses to frequently asked questions, cutting down your customer support time significantly.
Tidio
Free - $18/month
This is another popular Shopify app with 4.8/5 stars and 891 reviews. Tidio allows you to merge live chats with bots to deal with all questions or to push out promotions to your customers. Tidio notes that about 43% of inquiries are completed through a chat bot, so automating these responses will loosen the load on your customer support team greatly. You can instantly increase sales through sending automated abandon cart messages asking why the customers left their order and offer them a discount. For non-English speaking customers, Tidio also offers support in multiple languages.
ManyChat
Free - $10/month
ManyChat is a robust chatbot service that is done through Facebook messenger, or you can integrate the chat directly into your Shopify store. You can learn how to do that here. Manychat is a messenger bot that I’ve frequently dealt with in my own online shopping experiences. I’m subscribed to Fashion Nova’s ManyChat app, and get discounts and promotions sent directly to my Facebook messenger.
ManyChat allows you to set up detailed flows to address a majority of questions or to push promotions or updates and news. The sophisticated bot guides the customer on the journey you set for them. You can choose from a library of templates and customize them to your brand’s voice and message. If the bot cannot easily answer your customer’s questions, a live ticket will be opened up for your customer service team to address.
Collect.Chat
Free-$99/month
Collect.Chat is an easy to use and looks great on your online store or site. It’s a popular app used by companies like Airbnb and even by the UK government site. If you wish to integrate it with your Shopify store, you can learn how to do so here. A great feature about collect.chat is their interactive interface, that actually makes talking to a bot entertaining. You can easily customize their variety of templates and setting up flows is made easy through drag and drop elements.
Chatbots are a wildly growing service that many online shoppers are expecting your ecommerce store to be equipped with. If your business is already involved in email marketing, chatbots are the new frontier, and they already have 10% higher click through rates than emails. Not only are they great for cutting down your customer service efforts significantly, they are rapidly becoming more effective than emails for marketing purposes. They are more interactive and give your customer a more personalized shopping experience. So, get your business going with chatbots and start engaging with more customers!
