Live chat is one of the best ways to get instant communication with a company. It has become not only the leading method for online support but also yields to the highest satisfaction rates among customers. Your customers enjoy Live Chat more than any other customer service channel. It gives you the ability to create an experience that goes beyond the traditional customer service. It has the ability to provide the convenient answers that customers want, while also adding significant benefits to the staff and bottom line of companies. Live chat can improve your business and maximize its effectiveness.
Why will it be popular with your Customers?
If you think about it, there are often times when your customers have to wait 10 minutes ‘in a queue’ just to speak to you over the phone. Aren’t there more productive things they could be doing with their time? Live chat eliminates that waste of time for them – and everyone can appreciate that – it provides an instant response. Your customers prefer to use live chat because it’s often easy to use during business hours and they can multi-task by responding to emails while waiting for the live chat representative to respond to their questions. This makes the experience more enjoyable, convenient and productive.
When customers engage with a live chat representative, the experience is quick, simple and usually personalized; meaning chat agents can help the customer with the context of customer’s history and activity. With access to cloud-based tools, agents can provide better, more relevant support to customers – which, in the end, is a “win-win” for both the customer and the agent.
Customers like knowing that they can get immediate help if needed and instead of waiting for days to receive answers via email, customers can receive their answers immediately and continue with their online purchase. Waiting for days for an email response can be so frustrating to a customer that they won’t return to the website even after they receive an e-mail response. Customers prefer to get answers and help right away, while they are on the website or in the middle of a transaction.
Why is it beneficial for you as a business?
A live chat service on your website can help to build rapport with your visitors over time. Live chat functionality is still a relatively new tool, but don’t let that imply there aren’t widespread benefits for your company. Adding a live chat functionality to your website allows customers to chat with your business in real-time to ask questions, get advice and build confidence during their browsing experience, while improving conversion rates for your business.
- Live Chat Cuts Down on Expenses
As customer service teams use live chat, they see an overall decrease in the service costs in supporting online customers. The initial set-up and implementation of a live chat tool is quick and easy. Overall, the use of live chat can save money on implementation, ongoing platform and service costs, and employee task time.
- Increased sales
Not only do customers love live chat, businesses love it too. With the wide variety of choices that customers have online, a customer at the stage where an item is in their cart is a big deal! If a customer gets to that point and needs support, the likelihood of them making a phone call or sending an email is quite low. But it is highly likely to use live chat because of its immediacy. After having a positive support experience, customers are more likely to return and do business with that company in the future.
The key is that customers have someone who can immediately walk them through a sale if they become confused or have a question that can make or break a sale. This helps eliminate bounces away from retail websites and ensure that full shopping carts make it through check out. Once customers are engaged with an employee who can understand their needs, the employee is in a perfect position to recommend additional purchases that may be the perfect fit for that particular person.
Customer retention is critical to the long-term growth of your business. Returning customers often spend more, refer friends and family members in their network and remain a paying customer for decades depending on your industry and the competitive landscape in that market. Using a live chat program can help foster these long-term relationships because it shows your company truly cares about your customer’s input and happiness.
Tips on Making Live Chat go the Extra Mile for Your Business
Live chat can obviously increase your business potential, but only if it’s executed correctly. Here are some important tips to ensure you make the most out of your live chat functionality:
- Train your team! Your live chat representatives have to be extremely knowledgeable about your inventory and website navigation. Provide cheat sheets and FAQs to improve their performance and to make it easier for them to answer your customers’ questions quickly.
- Don’t be too robotic. The whole point of having live chat available is to provide warm, human help to a customer’s shopping experience. Having robotic greetings or responses can kill the effectiveness of live chat.
- Consider hiring people with sales experience. For the most effective use of live chat, consider using inside sales people and not just customer service representatives. People who have sales experience will more likely lead customers towards sales and increase the possibility of upselling.
- Don’t forget to boost your social media. When your live chat representatives receive positive feedback from online visitors and customers, consider instructing your representatives (or sales people) to nicely remind your visitors to Like your Facebook page and leave a comment on it.
- Be prepared for surges in chat volume. Customers need to understand that they are in a queue and a representative will be with them shortly, if not immediately.
- Give your customers helpful chat features. Customers will also need to be able to modify the font size and to request a transcript of the chat.
We hope this has been helpful for you to decide if Live Chat is for you and your business.
We really enjoy managing live chat on behalf of our customers, providing help desks and customer service desks. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on info@edivert.co.uk.
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