When a potential buyer comes to your site, either it easily finds what she wants or just leaves. At most, if there is a chat window available, she’ll try to ask there a quick question before exiting the site. But a buyer will never fill a form (when was the last time you took the time to fill a form on a website?). Too much time to do and no idea when the shop owner will come back with an answer.
This is why live chat is becoming so popular. Just look at the stats of live chat solutions for any of the major web platforms. But while it’s true that talking to a human always provides a better conversation and a higher conversion rate, this is something that small business cannot afford. If you are a one person business, you have plenty of things to do and cannot just be looking at the screen to see if a new question pops up. Even less on a 24/7 basis.
Small shops are at disadvantage here. They cannot provide the same level of support that the big players offer. Or can they?. I’ll argue that somehow yes, they can!
By using chatbots, you can immediately answer all common questions visitors of your ecommerce store may have while you still take care of your business. The chatbot becomes your main customer support channel. True, it’s not perfect (but we could say the same about companies outsourcing their customer support, external people will never master all details of your business and, as bots, will stick to predefined answers to common questions) but it can be good enough with some training. The only thing you’ll need to do is to first write down the FAQs of your site, which in itself is already a useful exercise. And by writing them down, you’ll make sure the bot will always give the same consistent answer to the same question, avoiding misunderstandings.
Of course, you may miss important questions. Well, with a simple chatbot monitoring, you’ll find what people ask that the bot doesn’t know and you can make sure the bot learns from previous conversations!, among many other benefits of chatbots for ecommerce.
For all these reasons, chatbots are indeed the great equalizer for small ecommerce stores, enabling them to level up the customer support field. And you can even combine a chatbot with live chat so that you still have the option to jump in the conversation for highly valuable clients or when the bot is unable to answer and needs your help.
