When should your store be available for live help?

A shopper reaches your store at nine in the evening with one question standing between them and a purchase. If nobody is available, the question waits. Often the purchase waits with it.

Live help is a staffing decision before it is a software decision. The useful question is not whether to offer it, but when.

Forrester reported in March 2018 that half of US online adults would abandon a purchase if they could not find a quick answer. That finding concerns whether an answer is available at all, not which hour it arrives in. It is a reason to look at when your own customers are asking.

Read your own data before you schedule anyone

Your Shopify analytics show sessions and orders by time of day. Look at a few weeks and separate the hours that carry visits from the hours that carry orders.

Those two patterns often differ. A store may see its highest session count during a weekday lunch break and its highest order value on a Sunday evening. The second pattern is the one worth an advisor's time.

Check where your customers are as well. A store selling across several time zones may find that one block of hours covers most of its orders, or that no single block does.

Start narrow and publish the hours

Two or three hours a day is enough to learn something. Choose the window your data points to, staff it properly and leave the rest of the week as it is.

State the hours plainly on the page. A shopper who knows an advisor is there at seven can come back. A shopper who clicks and finds nobody rarely tries again.

When the window is closed, offer the next route: a form, an email address, or the time help returns. An unanswered click is the least useful outcome of the three.

Judge the window on what it produced

Count the conversations, not only the orders. A window that produced ten questions and two sales still tells you what your product pages left out, and that is worth having in a slow week.

Include preparation and waiting time in the cost, not only the minutes spent on calls. An advisor who is available for two hours is unavailable for other work for two hours.

Then move the window rather than widening it. If the evening block fills and the afternoon one does not, shift the hours. The behaviour that tells you someone is waiting on an answer is covered in 5 signs a shopper may need help before buying.

Treat the hours as a promise

Hours you cannot keep are worse than hours you never offered. One missed window teaches a returning customer not to rely on the service.

Set the schedule against the staff you actually have, including holidays and sick days. Fewer hours held reliably will serve a store better than a wide window covered by whoever happens to be free.

Live shopping works when a customer can predict it. Choose the hours from your own data, keep them, and review them once you have a few weeks to look at.