Customer service is essential to your success in any business, including the jewelry industry. Customers thrive on first impressions, including a friendly voice, kind smile, and generally helpful demeanor. But in the digital age, many of your customers will be first browsing online rather than stepping foot in a brick or mortar store. You should check out our post on remarketing your website to get some extra insight on moving forward in the digital age.
As an extension of excellent customer service, many businesses have introduced live chat support on their websites. While this is a growing trend, is it necessary for your business? To make it in today’s market, there is a good chance your jewelry website needs live chat support. Here’s why.
- Live Chat Support provide a personalized experience in an impersonal environment. Usually online shopping is fairly impersonal. You add items to a cart, check out, and move on with your day. Chat windows can pop up on the screen when a potential customer is browsing through your site, allowing him or her to ask questions and connect with your business during this important step in their purchasing experience.
- The customer service agent can easily multi-task. If you are concerned about the cost of having an employee on hand to respond to customers via chat, consider how easy it will be for an employee to help multiple customers at the same time. Since it is all virtual, your employee can have many different chat windows up at the same time, speaking to a variety of customers.
- Live Chat can help close the deal. LiveChat can take your sales up to the next level. Offering to answer questions or even make shopping suggestions to your potential customers can encourage them to complete the sale or to physically go to your store to have a first-hand look at the piece or pieces they are considering purchasing. If your customer is struggling with the checkout process for an online purchase, your live chat window can step right in to ensure the customer does not get frustrated and wind up abandoning the cart and not finishing the sale. You can also read our post How Can You Increase Store Traffic this Fall for more ways to get customers physically in your store.
- Using chatbots.If you are concerned about having the resources to manage live chat, another solution that can help your business is chatbots. It is always good to have someone on hand to be there to answer questions your online customers may have. However, having a chatbot is another alternative, or addition to your live chat support that can help cut down on your investment in employees, and instead use an automated chatbot that could help clients with simpler queries. A chatbot is a chat window where the customer types in a question and the bot can automatically answer it, helping close a sale by using preprogrammed responses based on common questions that your customers ask.
- Jewelry shopping is an emotional experience.Often selecting jewelry is more related to emotion rather than what the products offer. Your customer is thinking more about whether the recipient will like the piece, and less about what the features are of the piece. In e-commerce they are alone in this emotional process, with less personalized guidance to help guide them to finding the perfect section. Introducing LiveChat allows you to bond with the customer. A website can’t replace a person. A website can’t ask the shopper “tell me about the person you are buying this for, what is the occasion...etc.” That live interaction allows your team to connect to the buyer.
- Recurring business. Repeat customers are your ideal customer, building a relationship that can last a lifetime. LiveChat is more likely to create recurring business, helping you become the “jewelry guy” for your customers. According to an eMarketer report, 63% of the people surveyed said that they were more likely to return to a website after using LiveChat with 62% saying they would shop from that e-commerce website again.
If you are considering adding live chat to your website, contact GemFind today to schedule a consultation with our digital marketing team. We are experts at e-commerce optimization, whether it is implementing LiveChat or getting Customers to pull the trigger on an abandoned cart, we can review your jewelry e-commerce store and help you generate more sales.
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