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He discovered foosball (or table football) 20 years ago as a hobby and very quickly realised how much he likes it. Since then he’s come a long way. Not only he holds several champion titles in Germany, but he also won Europe and even became a World champion in 2014. Oke Harms is a foosball legend. But he also runs a successful online store and is a cherished customer of Smartsupp.
He started with Kickerkult.de in 2008. By now the store has more than 10.000 products available and in addition a retail store on the well-known high street “Kurfürstendamm” in Berlin. It has now become the #1 in Germany regarding foosball and other related recreational products.
What made you think you needed to start using a live chat and why did you choose Smartsupp?
We like to reach out to our customers on all levels so that each question can be answered as fast as possible. More and more customers contact us on their mobile devices, therefore it was paramount to offer a chat, where customers can write to a specialist directly. We can put all our knowledge into the chat software in order to make our customers find the perfect product.
We decided to go with Smartsupp, because it provides us with the simplest, most uncomplicated solution we were looking for in our store. Minutes after the integration of the chat we already had our first customer asking a question resulting in an immediate purchase.
How does Smartsupp help your business and what is your favourite feature?
We noticed that our product descriptions needed adjustments after the questions from customers started to come in. The chat helps us to find appropriate content for the product pages. The chat usage increases every day and long time-consuming phone calls that often involve just little things are no longer happening.
My favourite Smartsupp feature is definitely automatic messages. Thanks to them we now also reach undecisive shy customers, we can shift their doubts and help them make that order.
What other channels do you use for customer communication and does chat stand comparison with them?
Besides the chat we use the contact form, but since the chat took off, we hardly get requests via the forms. B2B customers still often initiate the contact via email or phone. However, the chat lets us reach customers quicker. Short questions asked on the phone decreased. Communication via email and phone takes up more work and customers do not respond as quickly as in the chat.
What do you think about the new features we are preparing – multi channel dashboard and chatbot?
Regarding the multichannel, it would be very nice to also answer facebook or maybe google my business messages in the chat.
But chatbots are not for us. We generally noticed that all customers are surprised how fast we answer back and that it is not a chatbot they are writing to. Customers connect the bot with a rather negative experience and appreciate the prompt and precise answer of our co-workers very much.
Still confused? Contact us via the chat box in your dashboard and we’ll be happy to get in touch with you. Please note that customer service is included only in paid packages.