Ask HN: Does live chat support really increase conversions?

2 points by zinghaboi 10 years ago | 1 comment

We run a little e-commerce store and we tried a free live chat software for a month. We saw quite a few chat sessions during the month and we thought we did a decent job. Providing live support is hard because context switching kills productivity but I was hoping live chat would bump our user happiness. Despite our efforts, the conversions for that particular month didn't go up by much.

It was all 9am-6pm live chat with founders themselves, without any scripted answers. We tried to be as prompt as possible. Where exactly did we go wrong? I've seen several blog posts claiming that live chat increases conversions. What has been your experience with live chat on your website? Did it increase conversions? Should we have tried it for longer than a month? Does it work for other industries but doesn't work for b2c online stores?

Thanks

sharemywin 10 years ago |

I would think for small purchases of products <$80 if you have sufficiently answered they're questions in the product descriptions and/or your navigation is good enough for them to find what they are looking for you might not need it. I would use the opportunity to see if your meeting the needs of your traffic and if not what you could offer that they're looking for and/or answer questions on product descriptions and shipping pages etc for questions they have.