Best Live Chat Software for Magento 2: Free & Paid Solutions
The list of live chat extensions that will boost conversions of your Magento 2 website.
When live chats were invented, they were considered a breakthrough. For the first time ever, it became possible to ask and get an answer from a business immediately without even leaving its homepage. The new technology turned out to be more convenient than phone and email and was adopted by lots of online stores.
Advantages of Live Chat
According to ATG Global Consumer Trend Study, 90% of US consumers consider live chat a useful option. Moreover, emarketer.com has revealed that 60% of customers would like to return to websites that provide a live chat feature. Why do people love this functionality so much? Let’s have a look at its benefits.
Live chat is unobtrusive. A tiny icon in the right bottom corner of the screen doesn’t bother anyone who isn’t going to use it. Those who want to ask you something can easily click the icon. Once clicked, a small chat window pops up.
Live chat is extremely convenient. First of all, using it provides people with immediate access to reps who can answer any of their questions. No matter what they ask about. They may want to find out more about delivery or report some issues with the product. Anyway, with the live chat option, they can get support as quickly as possible.
Live chat allows users to browse a website at the same time as they are chatting. Users don’t need to stop doing what they want while chatting with your staff. The ability to multitask is considered to be a great advantage of live chats.
Live chat helps customers to make a decision to buy. The functionality is frequently used by those who are thinking of making a purchase. These people hesitate, and that’s why they need more information. Often the simple contact with another person via live chat is enough to convince them to complete a purchase. According to a study by Acquire, 79% of people admit that the answers they get while chatting have an impact on their buying decision.
Live chats significantly boost conversions. As we’ve already said, 60% of buyers are interested in returning to a site that offers live chat support. Also, the live chat option helps to build strong and trustworthy relationships with your customers, which will turn out to be profitable for you in the long run. While a good conversion rate is recognized to be from 2% to 5%, there are cases where websites have improved conversions up to 45% just by adding a live chat option.
People feel satisfied after using live chat. They get questions answered in a flash and this helps them to solve problems and decide whether to buy or not. A successful chat session leaves them with a positive view of your web store and its customer service.
Live chat helps effectively manage the time of your employees. With the use of a live chat website function, sales representatives can perform several sessions coincidently. It saves time in comparison to assistants who work via mobile and are able to serve only one person in a single period of time. This feature also makes live chat one of the most affordable customer service options since you need to hire fewer employees.
Live chat humanizes your brand. Consumers want to know that their needs are important to you. They appreciate businesses that give quick and informative answers helping them to solve their problem. This improves your brand image, making consumers more likely to buy and return. According to Marketing Power, visitors who use live chat are three times more likely to convert into customers. This is because of the empathy they experienced when talking to another person.
Having read everything mentioned above, you may think live chat is an ideal technology. Actually, it’s not always true. There are some disadvantages to live chat. We identified two of them, but even they can be easily solved.
The first disadvantage of live chat is that somebody may feel it impersonal like talking to a robot. Really, while chatting we don’t see the person who is messaging us. That’s why some categories of consumers still prefer phoning when they want to reach a customer support service. This is the case, for instance, with seniors who question whether live chat actually connects them with a real person. You can change this by choosing the right tone to communicate with your customers. Make it as humane and warmhearted as possible, and you’ll inevitably see the results.
The second disadvantage is that after having implemented live chat, you have to take into account time zones of your customers. If you sell in a single country this may not be a problem for you, but most e-commerce businesses are about expanding markets. Since websites work 24/7, you might get requests in the night as well. If you sell around the world, you definitely need to provide 24-hour customer support service. And if your business covers several time zones, you may want to consider adding a few extra hours when your live chat support is online. If it’s impossible, don’t forget to notify users about the availability of a chat.
Best Magento 2 Live Chat Extensions
There are tons of extensions for Magento 2 on the internet and live chat is no exception. If you try to choose it on your own, you’ll probably spend a lot of time digging into references and technical characteristics. We decided to do this work for you and published the list of the most trustworthy Magento 2 live chat extensions.
LiveChat by LiveChat
This is a great tool that adds live chat functionality to your store. It allows you to customize your design, positioning, and welcome message. Also, with this extension, you can trigger those users who are likely to make a purchase. Set up parameters, write a default message, and the chat will automatically pop up for those who’ve abandoned their cart, visited the same page several times or spent a particular period searching on an online store.
LiveChat can be used for free during a 30-day trial. After it ends, you have to buy one of the licenses which vary in cost from $16 to $149 per seat.
Zopim Chat by Zendesk
Zendesk has made a legendary extension which is often recommended. Apart from ordinary live chat features, the tool allows gathering visit statistics, getting messages offline, disabling the chat window on certain pages. Moreover, the extension saves and stores data (name, email, phone number of customers) in order to enable admins to provide personalized support. At the same time, the chat includes required EU cookie compliance modes.
As for Zendesk’s pricing, you can choose between four packages: lite, basic, advanced, premium. Lite is free while others cost from $11.20 to $44.00 per agent/mo.
Additionally, you’ll have to buy the extension that integrates Zendesk’s widget with Magento 2. Its price is $39.
Live Chat by Tawk.to
This is a simple extension with the basic features you need for running live chat support. It allows monitoring your website visitors in real time, managing the chat from either desktop or mobile, localizing messages in a specific language, etc. Having installed this tool, you get the opportunity to stay in touch with free Android, iOS, Mac OSX, Windows apps. You can leverage the extension via any modern browsers as well since it is compatible with almost all of them. According to Tawk.to, the software is used by 250,000 companies. As you can see, it is extremely popular.
The extension is totally free. The only thing that is required is a free tawk.to account, which you can create on the tawk.to website.
Chat System by WebKul
This extension is packed with a bunch of useful features. It allows you to create multiple chat agents, set up different photos for them, store the history of your conversations. Also, the tool provides you with the opportunity to reply to several queries at once, which significantly eases the work. Using this software, you can change the name of a chat window on the frontend as well as set its background colors. When a new message is received, the chat lets you know with a notification.
The extension costs $65. You can either install it yourself or ask for professional help. This service will cost you an additional $13.
Live Chat by ChatPirate
ChatPirate provides its solutions to a wide range of eCommerce platforms, including Magento 2. It’s quite simple and affordable. The extension consists of great features that are designed to improve your conversational efficiency. For example, it shows you the text users’ type on chat before they send it. This will help you to anticipate customers’ queries and respond faster.
The extension also allows watching what people do on a site, adding eye-catchers to the chat window, restricting live chat access for team members, and much more. The tool uses SSL encryption to protect all the data within the chat. And the icing on the cake is that analytics features are coming soon.
The extension is provided in three packages:
● Basic costs $7 per month
● Pro costs $14 per month
● Enterprise costs $99 per month
ProProfs Chat
This live chat software can be easily integrated with 50+ tools and platforms, including Magento, WordPress, Salesforce, Zendesk, etc.
One of the best things about the solution is that you can efficiently engage with your potential customers by informing them about product launches, brand news, or promotions. You can also go the extra mile and set a chat invitation popup or even give product tours. What a joy!
The pricing plans are starting from $10/month, which provides an unlimited amount of chats, ratings & surveys functionality, converting customers’ messages into CRM support tickets.
How to Increase Conversions Using Live Chat
Live chat is an extremely powerful tool that can bring you huge profits. But it’s just a storefront behind which many business processes are hidden. You should get all of them going to give full play to live chat. Let’s see what can be done to get the most out of the functionality.
First of all, train your live chat reps. Live chat doesn’t turn visitors into buyers. It’s just a tool that eases the connection between customers and businesses. For it to work efficiently, you definitely need great professionals operating behind the scenes to answer questions. You can either hire them or teach, doesn’t matter. But skills really matter. A good specialist speaks the customer’s language, knows how to be both professional and casual at once, and how to prompt a consumer to make a purchase softly.
Think of live chat as a way to sell. If you want to boost conversions, you’d better have salespeople rather than just consultants working on live chat. Try considering it a path to purchase. First, people ask you for support. Second, they buy products. To fulfill this approach you can add eye-catchers to the chat icon, welcome users first, and track their activity. If you see somebody who is likely to make a purchase, you can send them a boilerplate message like:
Have a list of ready-made templates. It will definitely be useful if you are speaking with several clients and don’t want to not waste their time. Boilerplate messages help you to answer more quickly, which in turn improves customer experience. Sometimes you need to type quite long explanations. Imagine only having to spend 10 seconds copying the text, customizing it a bit and pressing send. Customers will love it!
Many users will never open an FAQ page when they have questions, so you’ll be obligated to explain the same things over and over again. Be ready for that. But make smart use of templates. Customize them for every person. Remember, customers have to sense that they are talking to a real human. It’s essential for live chat sales.
Gather customer information. This will be extremely helpful for your marketing department. Having got emails of your prospects you significantly increase chances to turn them into buyers next time. The majority of people your reps talk to via online chat are hot leads. Losing them means losing money. So, do everything to get their contact information while chatting with them.
Imagine the situation where a visitor asks you about discounts on regular purchases. You can either immediately lay your cards on the table or continue playing and suggest emailing them all of your available packages. They agree and give you permission to contact them.
You can also collect customers’ details with the help of the live chat functionality. Some tools (for example, Zopim) allows requiring the data before chatting. Oliver Sweeney uses this approach carefully in order to not frighten off their customers.
When a visitor clicks a chat header, it expands and requires signing in to continue. But if a visitor hesitates to leave their data, the chat automatically sends a welcome message within several seconds. Thus, people who don’t want to share their info can chat with a sales rep as well.
Conclusion
So, live chat is a super convenient tool with a bunch of advantages. But to make the most out of it, you should pay special attention to business processes. Train your team, trigger customers, collect emails, etc. Having done that you may get up to a 45% increase in conversions.
And if you’re looking for an agency to implement live chat on your store be sure to contact us. We’ll help you to choose the right extension for your business and customize it in the most profitable way.
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