CBS Bahamas

How CBS Bahamas’ 24-hour live chat coverage drives digital sales

How the 'Home depot of the Bahamas' uses The Chat Shop’s Conversational Commerce solution to increase onsite conversions and engage shoppers.

The client

22%

Conversion of sales conversations to online purchases.

24%

Conversion of trade conversations to opportunities.

5x

Uptick in out of hours traffic converting into sales.

The CBS Bahamas Success Story

Originally founded in 1973 as Commonwealth Building Supplies Ltd by the famous Barbadian building contractor Carl G Treco, CBS Bahamas is the nation’s leading supplier and installer of Architectural Building products in both the commercial and residential markets.

Dubbed informally as the "Home Depot of the Bahamas", the brand has grown to also become the nation’s largest Home Improvement retailer, occupying a 30,000sqft retail space and the largest online catalogue in the country.

The challenge

Delivering a complete eCommerce experience around the clock for both retail and trade visitors with customer service at the heart.

For the Bahamas’ leading home improvement eCommerce site, customer service is at the forefront of their organisational DNA. CBS Bahamas’ sees over 6% of the country’s population visiting their site each month, with an even split of both residential and trade customers shopping for Architectural Building products. And with 40% of visitors shopping after hours, a team member isn’t always on hand to assist during the buying journey.

For anyone who manages an eCommerce site with an extensive catalogue of products, you know it’s all about personalisation and experience. So when site visitors were getting stuck navigating across CBS Bahamas’ 500+ products, the team knew there had to be a better, more personalised way to engage shoppers other than via traditional forms.

And by streamlining the buying experience, Brent and his team knew exactly where to focus:

  1. Giving buyers an amazing experience by greeting visitors with a personalised message and making them aware someone was on hand to help throughout the sales process.
  2. Connecting site visitors with a human and helping them find the right product
  3. Ensuring all visitors have someone to talk to and can get the information on the products they’re looking for.
  4. Assisting buyers through any hiccups during the checkout process.
"Great customer service is our #1 goal but the overwhelming volume of out of hours traffic made delivering on this goal a challenge." Brent Burrows Jr, Ecommerce Manager & Brand Strategist at CBS Bahamas

Our solution

Conversational buyer engagement right when they want it.

CBS Bahamas found what they needed in The Chat Shop’s Conversational Commerce solution which combines a sales-focused managed live chat programme and AI technology to provide real-time personalised engagement and customer experiences to help eCommerce businesses grow revenue, reduce cart abandonment, and strengthen their brand.

Transforming how CBS Bahamas engages buyers.

When developing a custom conversational commerce solution, we start with strategy and knowledge. To bring CBS Bahamas’ retail experience to their website visitors and deliver valuable conversations and sales, our digital strategists and conversational experts dove into CBS Bahamas’ product catalogue, Google Analytics, brand promises, and conversion goals.

Identifying, which site page visits were the perfect moment to interact with customers, Which brand-conscious messaging would compel a prospect to become a CBS Bahamas customer and which stages of the buying process could lead to drop-offs.

From the very beginning of their implementation, The Chat Shop were able to apply conversational experience best practices to CBS Bahamas’ conversational strategy including:

  1. Offering different experiences for each buyer segment.
  2. Directing customers to the right product in real-time.
  3. Recovering cart and checkout abandonments before visitors had left the site.

At the start of the journey we didn't know The Chat Shop's live chat service could result into the sales success we've experienced. Barlin and the team introducing us to proactive, sales focused conversations via live chat was a game changer for our business and best of all, our customers love it.

Brent Burrows Jr
Ecommerce Manager & Brand Strategist at CBS Bahamas

The results

Conversational commerce - a messaging first approach that leads to both increased digital sales and world-class customer experience.

As CBS Bahamas set out to create a more personalised buying experience and replicate their world-class customer experience online, The Chat Shop was key in helping them deliver a more modern, innovative approach that enables instant, human, conversation-based interactions that move shoppers through the buying process.

With the valuable insights and service The Chat Shop provides, CBS Bahamas was able to ultimately deliver round the clock assistance to customers, creating a better buying experience, an increase in out of hours sales, and a method of success in engaging at the exact right time with the exact right message. A proven strategy that works for eCommerce brands.

The results? Over the last six months, Brent and the CBS Bahamas team have:

  1. Converted 22% of sales conversations into online purchases
  2. Converted 24% of trade conversations into opportunities
  3. Seen a 5x uptick in out of hours traffic converting into sales.

In addition to improving conversions, CBS Bahamas has seen added benefit with The Chat Shop leveraging conversation insights to gather intelligence into what information visitors are looking for and optimize the site and user experience to reflect their needs.

CBS Bahamas has seen a ton of digital sales success since implementing Conversational Commerce. And they’re not done yet. They plan to continue to optimize their use of conversations, experiment with bot-based conversational flows for specific support use cases, and build out even more conversational experiences to support other marketing channels including search, advertising, and social.

Speak to an agent

In case you hadn’t noticed, chat is very much our thing. So why not put us through our conversational paces and get in touch?

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