Auto Accessories Garage Website Gets 485% Conversion Boost with LiveChat

The challenge

World-class customer service

Replacing a broken car part can be a drag if you don’t know which bolt goes with which nut. With thousands of different part variants, editions, and models, it’s almost impossible to decide without asking that one friend who likes to poke around their car’s engine all the time.

What if you don’t have such a friend or need to find a replacement part quickly? You can always count on the Auto Accessories Garage (AAG) team and their advice over chat. Kyle Therriault, VP of Internet Strategy & Business Development at Auto Accessories Garage, said:

With countless options to purchase automotive parts over the internet, AAG distinguishes itself by providing a world-class shopping experience to provide the best customer support in the industry.

Kyle Therriault, AutoAccessoriesGarage.com

To deliver on that promise, the company is available seven days a week via livechat, phone, and email, helping customers with buying decisions and open order issues.

AAG started using live chat to help customers who didn’t know if the part they’d picked was the correct one or those who genuinely didn’t know what part they needed. Many customers prefer to make an order during the work day, so providing an alternate or less invasive means of communication makes sense.

The solution

From quick implementation to customer service powerhouse

AAG installed LiveChat on their site to offer their clients an alternative to phone communication. This alternative quickly started pushing out phone as the primary contact point with customers.

Initially, our goal was to decrease the percentage of inbound phone calls to our call center while retaining or improving the total number of customer interactions. We realized and surpassed these goals within the first month of implementing LiveChat.

Kyle Therriault, AutoAccessoriesGarage.com

AAG tested several live chat providers, including Olark and Boldchat, and eventually chose LiveChat because of its easy-to-use, simple design, and clean user interface. The implementation was a breeze too. All it took was adding a piece of code to the AAG’s website and creating a few agent accounts to get it going.

Currently, the company has 24 contact center employees with active LiveChat accounts. They were all trained to handle chats. This number of agents allows AAG to extend the reach of their customer service to later hours and offer it consistently, seven days a week.

During the busiest hours of the day, they found that employing two or three dedicated agents handling up to three concurrent chats is optimal. To adjust the chat staffing, AAG uses the staffing prediction report that suggests the optimal number of agents needed to handle a particular chat volume.

Increasing the revenue from chat

Apart from offering quick, precise, and readily available advice on automotive parts, AAG utilizes LiveChat to increase its sales.

Custom chat invitation is among AAG’s favorite features. It allows them to send targeted chat messages based on the product a customer is looking at. These custom invitations are of great help during promotional periods for specific products.

These invitations have a 30% higher chat interaction rate and result in a 5% increase in conversion rate over visitors that did not interact with live chat.

Kyle Therriault, AutoAccessoriesGarage.com

To see which products require some extra help, AAG used the Google Analytics integration to measure which product pages generated the most chats and created custom invitations for them. By tracking LiveChat events, they can even compare which products have the highest chat usage and set up programmatic chat greetings on those pages to help the customer before they even have to look for the live chat button.

The result

AAG’s live chat is a massive success among their customers 

Even though there were a few skeptics of integrating a chat service into the company’s website, they were disproved within the first day of launch. Customers who use AAG’s live chat are almost five times more likely to make a purchase. Moreover, their per-session value, as measured in Google Analytics, is nearly 400% higher than the site average.

We’ve had many customers tell us how much they enjoy chatting with our product specialists instead of having to pick up the phone or wait several hours for an email response.

Kyle Therriault, AutoAccessoriesGarage.com

From a customer service perspective, agents can now handle up to three chats concurrently, leaving other agents available for more chats and phone calls. As much as 18% of all AAG’s contact points come from chat, and the company plans to expand its chat use in the future.

Kuba Rogalski

LiveChat