To better understand holiday shoppers and their attitudes about online tools and channels, LivePerson, a provider of real-time online intelligent engagement solutions, conducted its 2012 Holiday E-Commerce Survey.

The 500 respondents were over 18 years old and had shopped online at least twice in the previous three months.

Highlights of the findings about holiday shoppers:

• 63% of respondents are planning to do a majority of their holiday shopping online, displaying a strong preference for using live chat over other engagement channels.
• Consumers are showing significant use of social platforms to interact with brands, with just under half of them using such channels as Facebook and Twitter to interact.
• Increasingly, consumers desire a better mobile experience, and they would like to use live chat via mobile devices.
• Tablets have become a go-to shopping device, and the majority of respondents (65%) expect to use the tablet device as one of two primary devices they use for holiday shopping.

What the above means for companies is that they have to increasingly invest on social and mobile (both mobile phones and tablets) platform with live chats functionalities to better engage customers.

Below is an infographic summarizing the survey findings.