Brand name.
Coggles.
What is it?
Accessible Luxury – Fashion Retailer.
What we can learn.
Any online store, no matter what size, can provide Live Chat as a service for its customers. The two things I focus on today are ‘where and when’ to show Live Chat functionality.
1. Where? Typically, Live Chat is triggered from the bottom right hand corner of a website.
On the Coggles website however, Live Chat is triggered from a neat ‘Live Chat box’ embedded in a product page, placed strategically below the ‘Add to Basket’ button and alongside the product details.
2. When? Again, Live Chat is typically accessed from all pages of a website, regardless of whether there’s a customer services person available to chat at that time or not. If Live Chat is unavailable a ‘Leave a message’ option is replaced by the usual ‘Chat now’ option.
On the Coggles website the ‘Live Chat box’ on a product page is only visible if a customer services person is actually available to ‘Chat now’. If not then the whole ‘Live Chat box’ is hidden automatically. Neat.
As a Coggles customer myself, it looks like the ability to ‘Chat now’ is only visible on certain product pages too. For example if the item is not available for immediate dispatch or it’s a high value item then the customer would potentially have questions before deciding whether to buy.
Upside.
Knowing when and where to offer Live Chat can help smooth the path to purchase.
Downside.
Choosing the right Live Chat solution can be tricky. Consideration should be given to setup time, initial and ongoing costs, ease of use and functionality.
Did You Know?
Around 79% of customers say they use Live Chat to get their questions answered immediately. (Source: Acquire / June 2020).
2 Comments
Stuart Fearn
Really interesting Lisa. I hadn’t ever experienced being responsible for implementing anything such as webchat. My area was usually F2F.
However I did implement our webchat on my organisations site and did exactly as Coggles have done.
It just felt appropriate to make it relevant where the product needed, where the service could be at its best and where and when not to disappoint.
For us it was really just a starting point but to the audience we were serving – Mortgage brokers, the best addition, offering the best service improvement we could have delivered. What we also found was with our delivery was that the resource also had to deliver instant high quality and knowledgable responses. As we chose to not share personal and specific responses a clear articulation of our service limitations.
Lisa Forster Owen
Thank you Stuart for commenting. Consumers are getting more demanding and want answers to their questions quicker than ever. The businesses that will thrive are those that provide consumers with what they want. Thank you again, Lisa.