Customer Service

More retailers offering chat to online customers

Photo by istock.com

June 30, 2021

More than half of retail brands, 51%, are offering online chat as a customer service channel, up from 35% at the start of January, and more than a third of brands rely just on bots to power chat experiences.

Those are prime findings from a Simplr study on conversational commerce and the consumer buying experience that polled 1,493 brands in May, according to a press release.

Consumers rated chat with human involvement as superior to a pure chatbox experience and 95% said they can tell when they're interacting with a bot versus a conversation with a human customer support person.

"The goal of chat is ultimately to reduce the effort needed by customers to get answers to their questions, paving a smoother path to purchase," Daniel Rodriguez, Simplr CMO, said in the release. "In this era of NOW CX, brands are really striving to meet ever-higher consumer expectations. This study makes it clear that where possible, companies need to blend the best of humans and technology to give consumers the immediate and personalized support they demand or those consumers will take their purchasing power elsewhere."

Consumer repurchase intent when human agents were involved reached 88%, while the repurchase intent based on chat experiences with no human help was 11%, according to the study.