Live chat is a great ecommerce conversion tool. But – there are some things you need to know before you install Shopify’s new Chat app.
Chat has Always been the Killer App!
Customers love to chat. From ICQ to Yahoo. From WeChat to WhatsApp. From SMS to Slack. Chat is the preferred method of digital communication.
Chat is a great way to reduce friction within a customer journey.
Imagine…
… your customer on a Product Detail Page, at the Zero Moment of Truth – and they can’t find your returns policy – or they are unfamiliar with the customs or VAT in a particular country. They want to buy, but sending an email or hunting down this information via FAQs is going to take time.
This is customer journey friction.
Actually, you probably don’t have to imagine this situation. Even the best Ecommerce sites can benefit from being able to respond to a customer’s enquiry in the moment.
Being able to answer a question right there, without the customer having to leave the page or wait for a response is extremely powerful.
Shopify Chat
There is no doubt that Shopify offers a lot of ‘Enterprise’ functionality ‘Out of the Box’ for free. With one click you can now install the Shopify Chat app on your store and interact with your customers in real-time.
We’ve tested Shopify Chat and we are underwhelmed.
What’s Good About Shopify Chat?
- If you use Apple products, then Shopify chat provides a way to chat with your consumers via your iOS device.
- The App is linked to your Shopify store, so you can push products into the chat session.
- Shopify Chat allows you to create draft orders for customers – which is nice, but not very scalable.
What’s Not so Great about Shopify Chat?
- It only works with Shopify Ping. Shopify Ping is an iOS only app. So you need an Apple device. Shopify has a track record for this – it seems that they choose to ignore entrepreneurs who use Android or Windows devices to run their business.
- We can’t seem to find a way to change the welcome message. You can customise the chat button colour, but best practise would allow you to signal to the customer if you are online or not or how long they could expect for an answer.
- There is no prompt to capture the user’s details for follow-up.
- The chat is not persistent. The best products in the market allow a user to stop chatting, return later and continue the same chat. Shopify Chat seems to be based on some other framework – perhaps sessions. The same customer on the same browser on the same device chatting 8 hours apart is not seen as the same customer.
- There is a bit of a lag between the chat being started and the notification in Ping. There is no signalling to the customer that the agent is typing or that the message has been received.
Better Options are Available
The Shopify Academy and most YouTubers who bang on about making millions from finding your niche and flogging them t-shirts are all about Facebook.
Facebook Messenger is baked into Shopify and Shopify Ping supports chat via Facebook Messenger. You can push products the same way you can with Shopify Chat but…. Facebook Messenger is platform agnostic. Yes your customer needs a Facebook account – but who is selling to people who don’t have one!
There are companies who have dedicated themselves to chat. Services like LivePerson and ZenDesk have been doing this for a long time and they offer a better service.
The live chat on this site is powered by Drift. Drift has some very useful tools that allow you to assign chat to multiple team members across time zones, it gives information about where the customer is and what page they are looking at and captures email for follow up. It has an App for iOS and Android and you can chat via a web-browser too.
Drift does work with Shopify, but you need to muck about with the code. It’s not a one-click app install.
Conclusion
If you run your Shopify store on Apple devices then this might work for you. It’s simple to install, but rudimentary at best. Try Facebook Messenger or a more full-featured Chat product instead.