How to Predict and Save Abandons with Live Chat

It’s incredibly frustrating to spend so much time and money building your store and driving traffic, only to see a huge number of people abandon the purchase process.

Posted 3 years ago by Irina Lanina

The average percentage of people that abandon is 75%, according to Barilliance, while the lowest average from other studies shows cart abandonment at 55%. This means at best, for every 100 people that start the purchase process, only 45 actually end up completing. Frustrating!!!

It’s much more effective to save abandons before they happen. 

• It’s possible to predict if someone is likely to abandon while they are still on your site and engage with them through live chat to remove their objections before they start to leave. 
• You can save a lot of sales with chat, and leverage the conversations for insights you can use to improve your site’s overall conversion.

At HelpFlow, we provide 24/7 live chat teams to over 100 e-commerce stores. After over six years in business and millions of chats, we’ve learned how to save a lot of abandons with live chat. We use a combination of technical wizardry and chat experience to make this happen, but will break down how you can do the same in this post.

Let’s get into it…

How To Predict Abandons 

The first step you need to do is predict if somebody is going to abandon before they actually leave. This might sound like rocket science, but with a few tools, you can get pretty darn close.

This is possible because there are patterns of people that abandon. They go back-and-forth between different pages of your site, they use the search and filtering functions on your site multiple times without clicking to product pages, or they generally just slow down in their navigation process.

You can identify the patterns for your site in a few ways. 

• Using a visitor recording tool, you can watch visitors that ultimately end up abandoning and start to see patterns of navigation in browsing between them. 
• You can also use Google Analytics to segment visitors that abandon, and then identify similarities between them. This approach is much more technical so it’s usually easiest to find low hanging fruit using the visitor recording method.

Engage Proactively With Chat

Once you have a high-level understanding of the browsing patterns people that abandon tend to have, you can configure proactive chat greetings to engage with these visitors as they start down that path. For example, if you realize that a huge chunk of people that abandon use your product search three times but don’t move into a product page, you can configure a chat greeting to appear after the third search.

The wording of the greeting is not as important as you may think. If you get the timing right, a personable and low-key greeting will perform incredibly well. Something like “Hi, Do you have any questions I can help with?”. You know you have it right when it sparks someone to say, “Actually yes!” and then ask their question. 

Once you’re in a conversation with someone, you can address their concerns directly and save the sale a lot of the time. Depending on the chat software you use, you can see what page they’re on and even inner page activity to guide them through the purchase process or to cater your answers to where they are on the website.

Leverage a Goldmine of Insights for Conversion Optimization

Not everyone will engage in live chat, even if they have a question. But you can use the insights you get from the conversations you do have to impact every single website visitor. Chat conversations are a window into the mind of the visitor, and you will start to see patterns after managing a reasonable number of chats.

For example, you may have a powerful site search function but realize visitors are not using it to find products. You can walk people through this on the chat, but this is something you can emphasize in your website design to guide more visitors to use it. By recognizing this pattern in chats and improving the flow of your website, you will be able to help a lot more people find the products they’re looking and purchase.

Once you get into a routine of reviewing chats regularly, flag the patterns you see and add improvements to your development list. These can be great tasks for the Carson team.

What’s Next? 

You’re never going to be able to save everyone that abandons on your site. But with a proactive approach to engage with them on chat before they abandon, you can save a big chunk of them.

Find the patterns of people that abandon, configure a simple chat system to engage with them before they abandon, and leverage the insights to improve your overall business.

Have questions? Let’s nerd out in the comments.