For more luxury retailers, kid-glove customer service includes live chat

Luxury retailers treat their big-bucks customers with kid gloves – and for more of those retailers, the kid-glove treatment online extends to live chat. Neiman Marcus has been a customer of provider LivePerson Inc. for the past three years and has been actively promoting live chat online to customers for the past year. Retailer eLuxury.com has been using live chat from LivePerson for the past year, and the product is also currently getting a look from Saks Fifth Avenue and other high-end retailers, according to the company.

The application can trigger an invitation to a live chat session based, among other things, on a shopper’s behavior on a site. LivePeson`s software can determine, for example, that a customer is lingering on a shopping cart page, which can alert the web-enabled contact center agent that the customer may need help, thus triggering an invitation to a chat session.

“They are looking at it as an extension of service they offer in their retail stores,” says a LivePerson spokesperson of the company’s luxury e-retail clients. The majority of retailer clients deploying LivePerson’s live chat function get a positive rating on 90% of post-chat surveys, according to the company, in addition to confirmation of live chat as the preferred communication method