Live Chat Customization: The Case for Personalized Shopper Experiences

Client engagement can often spell the difference between a completed purchase and a lost opportunity. Not only will live chat customization software address the needs of online shoppers, but it offers a personalized shopping experience that ensures brand loyalty over time. Let's look at how brands and retailers can leverage these systems.

What is Live Chat Customization?

Definition and Purpose

We'll begin by highlighting the relationship between live chat customization in relation to customer service. Automated chat is no longer just a means to answer a series of predetermined questions or serve as another channel to highlight a brand's identity and offers, with little to no functionality.

The latest models offer customer support solutions at scale, streamlining user engagement thanks to cutting-edge artificial intelligence. These improved capabilities have introduced the concept of flexible chat platforms and dedicated support solutions that can handle unique queries as an anchor point in the online shopping experience.

Key Features of Live Chat Customization

Live chat services today are like a toolbox, offering a variety of options to help businesses shape the perfect customer experience. Now, businesses can customize many different features to create a unique shopping experience that wasn’t possible just a few years ago.

Here are some examples:

• Tone of voice (including foreign languages)
• Logos and branding
• Personalized responses based on user inquiries
• Visual elements including colors, fonts, and emojis
• The inclusion of a welcome message
• Pertinent information such as opening hours
• Agent avatars

All of these can be used to streamline the interactive experience and to encourage shoppers to interact with the brand.

Benefits of Customizing Live Chat

Improved Customer Engagement

The purpose of any live chatbot is to improve customer engagement with the help of accurate 24/7 automated responses when an agent isn't available. This is even more relevant for online businesses that grapple with increasing volume of inbound visitors, as a portion will likely require assistance.

For example, fashion brand, IKKS, wanted to implement personalized customer support, but they required a cost-effective technique to do so, while effectively engaging with their existing client base.

After adopting the latest live chat customization software, IKKS was able to provide automated assistance to 52% of all website visitors.

Personalized Messaging

Much like human-to-human interactions, it's important to break the ice, so to speak, in terms of automated chatbots and customized customer engagement. This can be partially accomplished with the help of generative AI conversation starters, or phrases and queries predicted based on a shopper's preferences.

Also known as conversational engagement, some brands have even been able to boost their e-commerce conversion rates tenfold with this strategy. Personalization at scale is one element of the customer journey that is now possible thanks to how advanced widget customization has become.

Increased Conversion Rates

Although we've already mentioned that live chat customization will increase engagement, how can this strategy ultimately lead to higher conversion rates?

The answer is in optimizing the shopper's journey. In other words, customers expect tailor-made support solutions based on their previous habits and interests, as opposed to generic responses.

Take a quick look at this video to learn more about the value this tool offers e-commerce retailers:

Enhanced Brand Consistency

While establishing a brand identity is an important component in e-commerce success, consistency is the element that will help build rapport and trust with online shoppers. This is critical at every stage of the online buyer journey, as customers who begin to feel detached or unsupported during the buying cycle are more likely to abandon their cart and skip completing a purchase.

Live chat customization can offer a sense of familiarity and trust, increasing the chances that a browser will convert into a buyer, and a first-time buyer will evolve into a repeat customer.

How to Customize Your Live Chat for Better Engagement

Now that we've taken a look at why live chat customization is crucial, we need to address how each feature of these systems can be integrated into your existing business model.

Customizing the Chat Widget

Widgets should visually and functionally align with your business. And we're not only referring to overt concerns like a logo, branding, or tone of voice. To create a seamless customer experience for end users, automated chat services must reflect the preferences of the shoppers themselves, effectively mirroring the services that a human agent would provide when a representative isn't an available option.

Tailoring Chat Greetings and Responses

Online shoppers want to be treated as individuals, rather than an e-commerce statistic. This is even more relevant when catering to a niche audience.

Sideshow is a specialty manufacturer and distributor of the most highly sought-after licensed and original pop-culture collectible products, so their sales team interacts often with their niche customer base. The challenge here involved matching the tone of the chatbot to the well-established aesthetic and brand identity of Sideshow.

Thanks to the latest generative AI solutions, their team was able to multiply their conversion rate for fully automated chat conversations eight times. 

Configuring Chat Triggers and Automation

We're not saying you should go as far as creating a step-by-step guide to each customer to cross your site. But, a one-size-fits-all approach is hardly effective when it comes to online customer service, especially when consumers expect omnichannel access.

Shoppers want to be engaged at the exact moment of need in their unique journey with the information most relevant them. When we consider that more than 60% of consumers will abandon a purchase as the result of a poor shopping experience, simple automation is no longer enough.

Generative AI chatbots can now fire based on triggers built from unique client cues, enhancing the overall online buying process.

Integrating With Customer Data

True personalization is a level of insight that can only be obtained through the analysis of customer data. Live chat customization is most effective when integrated with other trusted customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce or Hubspot.

Businesses that can collect and interpret relevant data from individual shoppers (such as previous buying habits or past queries) will find it much easier to offer targeted solutions at the right time. Even the most advanced generative AI chatbots should never be thought of or treated as standalone tools.

Best Practices for Effective Live Chat Customization

Regularly Update and Optimize

These platforms are not set-it-and-forget-it technologies. Take a moment to think about how often an iPhone is updated, for example. Although older models still function, customers now require (and desire) the latest advancements, especially when it comes to personalization. This is just as relevant when discussing live chat customization.

Analyzing customer feedback is one of the best ways to determine if changes or optimizations are necessary. After all, it's much easier to correct a minor issue before it becomes a larger problem.

A/B Testing Customizations

Similar to the sandbox approach used to discover any bugs within a smartphone app before it goes live, live chat customization software will need to be tweaked from time to time. A/B testing is a great way to better understand whether customers are comfortable with the user interface (UI), what feature or element they're reacting positively or negatively too, or if any updates are in order.

Examples might include modifying the tone of voice, embedding answers to additional questions, changing its visual appearance, or integrating this software with other tools in the existing e-commerce stack.

Monitoring and Analyzing Performance

Even the most well-oiled machines require regular maintenance.This is equally true when discussing the role of live chat customization. Some important metrics to evaluate include:

• Retention rates after interacting with the chatbot
• The need for additional custom scripts
• Customer satisfaction rate
• Resolution rate
• Resolution time
• The number of interactions
• Conversion rate
• Escalation rate

Finally, we need to remember that even the most intuitive forms of live chat customization aren't meant to entirely replace human agents. But rather, they're designed to further streamline the online shopping experience and to make certain that customers are satisfied with the support that a business provides.