The Chat Shop increases sales and delivers 98% customer satisfaction with LiveChat

Working in the support service industry is challenging for one main reason: you work with customers from many industries and there is no universal solution that will work for them all. Every customer has different goals and problems, so it’s crucial to provide the right solution in the shortest time possible.

This is exactly why The Chat Shop decided to base their business on LiveChat. Thanks to this move, the company started to provide swift responses and seamless customer service. They were also able to skyrocket customer happiness and increase their client’s sales.

“We’ve demonstrated time and time again that when you put chatters who are highly trained and monitored, combined with a deep understanding of data driven decisions you can get amazing results. One of our property clients closed $4.4 million in sales over 9 months using our service. That’s the real potential of chat when done well.”
— Jonny Everett, Director of Customer Development at The Chat Shop

A wide range of services

The Chat Shop is a UK based company (in terms of their head office and their agents) providing end to end solutions for their customers. They help to create live chat strategies, to generate leads and to provide the best possible customer service.

As Jonny Everett said, the company works with customers from all industries one could imagine. “We increase bookings for student properties, generate leads for car parks, sell experience days, solve technical support issues and much more.”

The Chat Shop helps their clients to make the most of their marketing budget and deliver more leads from their existing traffic. They also work with customers who need help with their websites or with those who need to improve customer experience.

To provide the extraordinary service and support, it was very important to understand customers’ needs and expectations of live chat.

“For example, when Vita Student started working with us they were competing with incumbents in the student property sector,” said Jonny. As he explained, Vita Student’s challenge was to establish their premium brand and achieve full occupancy of residences. “Now we convert 42.5% of people that we chat to on their website!”

When The Chat Shop started the business, its founders have researched all of their options for a live chat provider to provide the technology to work with. “On the face of it they all seemed to have very similar capabilities but having delved deeper into each we found LiveChat fit our needs perfectly,” explained Jonny.

They especially liked the freedom to customize the chat to fit their customer’s websites.

According to Jonny, LiveChat’s customer service was also important during the implementation process. “The LiveChat team was also always there to help support us through the many questions we had at the time,” he said. “We still work closely with LiveChat to provide them feedback that helps them to improve their software, which allows more consumers to have positive customer experiences.”

Support multi-tool

One of the features The Chat Shop finds very useful in particular, is the ability to create unlimited agent accounts and apply them to any number of groups. It allows them to control what agents can access and who in the team will receive the chat.

Apart from simple chatting, The Chat Shop’s customer service team uses greetings to proactively invite visitors to chat. Since it’s possible to set up multiple criterias before the invitation starts, greetings are a very effective tool when it comes to customer support and sales.

“We can generate even more leads, convert a higher proportion of customers and solve customer problems before they’ve even thought of contacting customer service,” said Jonny. “With our understanding of what makes a successful chat engagement strategy and LiveChat’s tool, we achieve engagement rates 150% higher than industry average”.

To use optimal greetings settings and to monitor team performance, The Chat Shop’s team uses advanced reporting. “Being able to dig deep into individual clients, agents and tags is critical to us,” explained Jonny.

The team also extracts the data from the API and uses a custom reporting tool to merge LiveChat data with Google Analytics data. They study data on a macro and micro basis, working with clients to constantly look for ways in which the performance of their service could be improved.

Reporting is a crucial part of the company’s quality checks. “Account Managers review client chats and statistics weekly, and Team Leaders do so twice a week,” said Jonny. “This allows them to provide vital feedback and training, so that we are always growing as a team.”

The amazing results

Looking at The Chat Shop’s results of LiveChat implementation, you can say one thing: they hit the jackpot.

The most impressive are their sales statistics. They generate 50% more leads from existing website traffic. They also significantly increase conversion rates since visitors that chat are 5 times more likely to convert.

Their average customer satisfaction rating is also very high, at 98%. It’s not a surprise since they aim to help their customers as soon as possible.

“Our first response times and average response times currently sit at a remarkable 29s and 32s, respectively,” said Jonny. “Fast and accurate LiveChat responses are key if you want the user to have a positive experience. Creating that experience then allows us to really drive value for our client’s; whether that’s capturing their details as a lead, or resolving a nagging support issue.”

In the near future The Chat Shop plans to reduce response times even further and help their clients hit bigger lead generation and conversion targets.