When it comes to your website, live chat gives you an important opportunity to communicate with your customers.  Internet Retailer recently reported results from chain retailers indicating that online sales outpaced in-store sales growth in 2010.  No surprise there, right?  With growth in online sales (and growth in online competition), retailers are looking to live chat to ensure a successful customer experience.  A positive live chat interaction is just as important as greeting customers in a storefront – and can be just as effective.

We have all had those great shopping experiences we remember for years.  For example, I remember going to a hardware store – incidentally a chain – 40 miles from my house to purchase a material I’d read about online.  When I got there, I was greeted by a friendly, knowledgeable associate who politely discovered my needs and suggested I go in a different direction – to the paint department. Once there, an associate who’d already heard my story greeted me.  She quickly got me what I needed and sent me to the lumberyard, where they also knew who I was.  They loaded up my car for me and sent me on my way.  I drove home in awe and talked about that experience to anyone willing to listen for months (heck, I am even blogging about it six years later).

It can be difficult to build this kind of customer experience online, but live help makes it so much easier.  Agents know exactly what customers are after, how many times they have visited their site (or a particular page), what’s in their shopping cart and even have records of previous conversations.  Armed with a 360° view, agents can intelligently interact with each and every visitor to your site.  Meaning, agents can tailor their conversations with your visitors to such detailed information available within a click or two.   Unless it’s staffed by ninjas, a brick-and-mortar store will almost never be able to compete with that level of personalization. 

Your customers will thank you for attending to their needs with such a high level of care and skill.  And then they will tell other people because somehow their ordinary visit to yet another site on the Internet resulted in a magical customer experience. 

They may even blog about it years later…