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Thread: Communication with buyers

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Apr 2012
    Posts
    1

    Post Communication with buyers

    When dealing with customers purchasing product through e-commerce sites how often do you find that they will contact you with queries before committing to purchasing the product? And if buyers are contacting you before committing how many messages does it usual take to fully resolve the query before the user will actually make the purchase?

    This is an area that I have not been able to find much information so I was hoping that users on the forum would be able to provide some feedback.

    Thanks in advance,

    Chris

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Location
    East Hampton, NY
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    1,896
    One of the best ways is online helpdesks where you can communicate in real time. The problem is most small business sites do not have a full-time person to man the helpdesk so they are off line much of the time. In order to be effectual they must be available when the customer needs them.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Mar 2012
    Posts
    122
    Quote Originally Posted by roban View Post
    One of the best ways is online helpdesks where you can communicate in real time. The problem is most small business sites do not have a full-time person to man the helpdesk so they are off line much of the time. In order to be effectual they must be available when the customer needs them.
    You are right.
    Online helpdesks are very important especially when dealing with customers.
    Each business shoud consider help desk that will deal with the customers issues.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Mar 2012
    Posts
    9
    Absolutely agree. Helpdesk will help a lot in this situation. Else you can get info from products reviews or comments. If you need it, you should use special plugins.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Location
    Helsinki, Finland
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    9
    Don't want to be doing any advertising, but this is very much what our company is offering to their customers.

    This post is not going to try and persuade you to use our company, just a general idea of what can be done and some information from our clients.

    Basically one option is live chat. There are many providers such us our company and they all differ greatly. In our experience, there are two major bottlenecks where clients do not commit to a sale:

    1. Choosing the product. (Too much choice, hard to choose, if they dont know what exactly they want to purchase, details about the product or service and general help)
    2. Sales funnel. (Check out procedure, forms, technical stuff, billing, etc.)

    Now in the first case, it is important to recognize which customers are in this stage.

    You do not want to interrupt a customer that is going to make a purchase anyways, and for example our system can do this prioritization for you. But you can try the competitors too of course. Once you identified this customer, you should approach them via chat/help desk and offer suggestions, help, information, additional products. Etc. (I am trying to be as brief as possible)

    Generally the chats that lead to a sale last between 5 and 10 minutes and save a lot of time compared to e-mail communication. The problem with e-mail is also the fact that not many people are dedicated enough to start writing an e-mail and just leave. By utilizing a chat software, you can catch them and star the chat yourself. (Just be sure not to use a chat solution that has forms and pop-ups, that is the same as an e-mail in our experience)

    The other type is the customers in the sales funnel that are already in the process of checking out. One of our huge clients DNA Pro (Finnish mobile phone operator) found that the problem lies in a several steps of the check out process and is using Live chat to provide customer service during check-out (As well as add on sales too). This decreases the amount of dropped shopping baskets by a lot. These conversations are usually started by customers though and also last anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes.

    I hope that I have answered your question, but in addition to that there has been a study done by Forrester and Gartner where they showed that using a live chat system (Not a modern type even) decreased the amount of e-mail and phone calls (And associated costs) by 25% or so. So it is definitely a way to go if you want to make the sale as soon as possible.

    Once again, apologies if this was a little too "advertisement" like, was trying to be as neutral as possible
    LIVE Chat by giosg.com

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