Askly joins the Estonian E-commerce Association

In 2022, Askly joined the Estonian E-commerce Association, which brought together almost 500 online sellers and industry leaders.

At the time, Askly built a multilingual chat tool for online stores. Its goal was to make online support easier for shoppers and more efficient for support teams.

“We’re glad to make our small contribution to the growth of e-commerce. Real-time support on the website is one of the hottest trends in e-commerce. The chat window is no longer just a support channel. It’s also a place where sales happen, and we want that done well.”

Sandra Roosna, founder and CEO of Askly

Customer support is the face of your store

Some stores choose their newsletter pop-ups, chat tool, payment solution and so on mainly on price. Often, that’s because they don’t measure key metrics such as session length and abandoned carts.

Good tools for online stores exist for a reason: they are built to help the business grow. That includes chat tools that build trust and sales instead of annoying customers.

Serve customers while they’re still in your store

Online stores mostly talk to customers by phone, email or chat.

Reply by email or on social media, and your team can’t see whether the customer is still in your store.

The reply takes just as long, but the customer has often left by then. Winning them back is harder, so the same effort achieves less.

A shopper’s interest can fade quickly after they add a product to the cart.

Real-time support is the most time-efficient way to help customers while they shop, just as in a physical store.

In fact, support works much the same in a physical store as in an online one. Shoppers don’t want to wait 40 minutes or 3 hours for a reply.

Pushy pop-ups drive shoppers away

Imagine a physical store that worked like an online one. As you walked in, a couple of pushy salespeople would jump at you:

• “Cookies?”
• “Newsletter?”
• “Want to chat?”
• “First, show us your ID and give us your email!”

Only then could you look around. Let’s be honest: you’d just want to walk out.

It feels the same in an online store.

At the time, many Estonian online stores showed a pop-up within seconds of a visitor landing. A pop-up should only appear once the customer has looked at a few product pages.

Before that, they aren’t ready to sign up for a newsletter or respond to an offer of help.

As a shopper, you’d probably sign up for a newsletter too. But first, you’d want a good experience, the right product, fast delivery and friendly service.

Online stores began investing in smarter tools

Fortunately, more and more online stores were investing in smarter tools. E-commerce in Estonia was clearly moving forward.

Since then, Askly has become one AI agent for web chat, social media and email. Its AI Voice Agent answers phone calls.