Customer Communication on Your Shopify Plus Store: Time to Build a Conversational Chatbot

You've finally migrated your ecommerce store to Shopify Plus. Congratulations!

Now it's time to focus on driving traffic to your Shopify Plus store and actually working towards converting visitors into customers. Because this is where you need to level up your strategy as well!

Creating a well-designed and organized store is not enough when you’re a Shopify Plus brand. Sure, that's an important aspect too. But, the real challenge lies in how you keep your visitors thoroughly engaged when they come to your storefront, especially considering that you’re still competing for attention with the other brands out there.

This is where customer communication comes in.

On the store?

YES.  

Why Is Customer Communication Important?

Customer communication is one of the crucial building blocks of any ecommerce store. In fact, effective communication makes the customers stay on your store for longer, complete their purchases, and come back for more.

Gone are the days when communication was limited to one-to-many messages, such as mass emails, billboards, and TV commercials. However, new customers demand more personalization in the way you communicate with them. In fact, 70% of the customers named "personalizing their customer experience" as the top priority.

And they don’t just mean your emails or the ad campaigns you target them with. They also expect your on-site communication to be as personal and efficient.

When Is Customer Communication Important?

Being able to communicate with your customer during the sales process is crucial for increased conversions and revenue.

Communicating Pre-sales

Pre-sale communication builds confidence in the mind of customers and nudges them to make the purchase. For example, suppose the customer is browsing your products for a long time but still hasn't purchased anything yet. In that case, sales reps must communicate with them clearly and consistently to understand them and deliver the best solutions to any concerns they may have.

For an online store, this means being available on live chat and being the one to initiate the conversation with a welcome popup, asking them if they need any kind of help.

Communicating During The Sale

This is when the visitor has added a few products to cart to eventually make a purchase. But as we all know, all products added to carts aren’t purchased and that’s why most stores see a cart abandonment rate as high as 69%!

This is where communicating during the journey of making a purchase becomes important.  

For example, if they’re stalling checkout, it is a good idea to ask them if they need more details on the shipping and delivery. You could even keep them engaged by triggering a message through a chatbot that lets them know you’re running a limited period offer on the product in the cart!

The goal here is to keep them motivated to complete the purchase. Pretty similar to how an in-store salesperson keeps nudging you to buy the product in your hand because it is about to run out!

Communicating Post-sales

Your customer has completed the checkout process and paid you the money. But, if you think there's no need to spend money on communication with them post-sales, you can't be more wrong.

While many stores focus on customer conversion, the real gold is customer retention which is possible with effective post-sales communication.

During pre-sales and the purchase, the customers need help with product information and the checkout process. But, post-sales, they are more interested in the services they get from the business, such as:

- Purchase confirmation
- Delivery status updates
- How to use the product
- How to get the product repaired
- Refund and exchange related information

Now we’re pretty sure you're probably thinking how all this gets covered in the emails you send.

But ever wondered how your Shopify Plus store visitors want to be communicated with?

How Do Your Shopify Plus Store Visitors Expect Communication?

During the pre-sales, sale and post-sale journey, most online shoppers seek help almost ‘instantly’.

When you become a brand big enough to be on Shopify Plus, you have obviously built a reputation around your business. This reputation also leads to bigger expectations from you, including understanding how shoppers want to be reached.

Live chat has become the leading communication channel for online customers. In fact, around 42% of customers prefer live chat over other channels, such as emails, SMS or social media.

Wait, don’t freak out and hear us out!

As your store starts getting tons of orders a day - the reason why you actually moved to Shopify Plus, it can be hard to manage communication via live chat. That’s one of the reasons why even leading brands have a ‘dead chat’ instead of being able to communicate with their store visitors.

Keeping the flow of conversation might get tough, and personalization can become something difficult to achieve.

Further, hiring live agents is not a long-lasting solution unless you want to increase your operational costs. And when it comes to addressing complex questions, it can take a few minutes for them to respond as well.

Customers want instant answers. So, if you take 48 hours to reply to a customer query, it not only hurts your reputation but also increases your chances of losing a sale. Usually, customers start looking somewhere else if a live agent doesn't respond within five minutes.

So what do you do when on one side you have to tackle all too many orders, and on the other you have customer expectations of communication increasing by the day.

This is where your live chat needs to get smarter with the help of automations, chatbots and bot to human transfers, namely “conversational chatbots”.

What Are Conversational Chatbots?

You must have encountered a little popup in the bottom corner of a website asking you if you need help. You drop a message in the box and get an instant response against your query.

That's a simple chatbot which can help brands nudge visitors to engage with them during their browsing period, and provide immediate support by answering common queries even when a live agent isn’t available.

However, what if we make this chatbot seem like it's a human talking to the visitor?

Yes, conversational chatbots let the visitor lead the conversation by giving them cues and nudging them to interact with you in a certain way.

But can a chatbot really do that?

Well, that’s where a live chat and chatbot app like QuickReply.ai comes in. We enable you to create automated conversations using a Shopify chatbot builder!

All you need to know is what your potential customers expect assistance with when browsing through your store, what they usually need help with and what you can additionally offer to help them tide over the pre and post-purchase anxiety they face.

Introducing Conversational Chatbots For Shopify Plus Stores With Quickreply.ai

QuickReply.ai is a live chat and chatbot app for Shopify stores. Apart from the traditional live chat widget, it also comes with a powerful chatbot builder created to enable online stores to set up conversational purchase journeys on their storefront.

It comes with a drag and drop interface that lets you build a conversational bot that branches out in different conversations to cover pre, during and post purchase communication - all on your website.  

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To make things easier, it comes with pre-trained bots that can tackle most customer queries at all stages of their purchase cycle on your store.

For example, if a shopper wants to know what size they should pick, the chatbot sends them a link to the size guide. At the same time, the bot is trained to ask if the customers need more help.

If the customer responds with an affirmative response, the chatbot continues to converse with them, answering queries one at a time, and continually asking them if they need further assistance - pretty much similar to how an in-store salesperson assists you with a size, then the options available, the discounts, etc - until you actually reach the billing counter to make the purchase.

Definitely looks like human interaction, right?

Well, that’s not all.

We do realise that your customers may ask questions that don’t have a traditional or ready answer that can be added into the conversational chatbot flow.

To tackle the same and keep your Shopify Plus store’s reputation high up, we have also built a smart bot to human transfer.

If at any point during the conversation, the chatbot is not able to leverage the flow you have created or find answers to what a buyer may have asked, it automatically notifies you to step in and take control of the communication!

It lets the customer know it’s reaching out to you for stepping in, and at the same time, keeps them engaged.

Using conversational chatbots has proven to free up space for human customer service by automating complex customer interactions that can be repetitive and time-sensitive. Plus, it helps improve the performance of live agents as more cases get solved per hour without them having to step into all conversations, keeping their focus only on those that may need extra assistance or crucial matters that can make or break your relationship with the customer.

FAQ-

Q1. Is Shopify compatible with chatbots?

Ans: Shopify chatbots are the best way to provide customers with personalized, real-time solutions. They can automate returns, report on order status, and increase sales by quickly checking inventory.‍

Q2. What is the purpose of chatbots?

Ans: A chatbot, at its most basic, is a computer program that simulates and processes human conversation (either written or spoken), allowing humans to interact with digital devices as if they were speaking with a real person.

‍Q3. What is a Shopify chatbot?

Ans: A Shopify chatbot allows eCommerce businesses to use the rich data available in Shopify to provide personalized, real-time responses to potential customers. Real-time order status, automated returns, increased sales, inventory check, and refund status in seconds.

Install the Quickreply.ai app today!

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