Any modern business looking to offer great customer service has to take advantage of live chat applications.
Live chat offers customers swift and immediate support they have come to expect during their browsing and shopping experiences. In addition, because the majority of companies are yet to capitalize on this niche, it is a largely untapped resource.
This article breaks down the many benefits available to your company by utilizing live chat on your website.
1. Better Customer Service
Any form of customer service that doesn’t involve listening to hold music was always going to prove popular. Consequentially, Live chat has revealed itself to be something everyone was waiting for, even if they didn’t yet realize it.
How much do modern browsers and shoppers dig live chat? To put it modestly, they like it a lot. The customer service survey that was done by eDigital found live chat had customer satisfaction levels of 73%, making it far more popular than email and phone services.
Live chat is convenient for customers for several reasons: it’s instantaneous, it allows people to multi-task, there is no real wait time, and you can solve the problem there and then unlike emails which usually require more drawn out correspondence
It is also a great way to guide customers through any doubts they might be having in real-time. Which leads us to our next benefit…
2. Better Sales
Multiple studies have been made which track the effect that live chat has on the sales process. The results have been overwhelmingly positive. Some studies claim that having live chat increases sales by 5 times the amount of a website without live chat. 5 times as many sales just from adding a live chat feature to your website!
It provides visitors with instant access to your support staff and sales team which allows you to turn site browsers into customers. Having well-trained agents available 24/7 helps to ensure that no potential customers fall through the cracks.
3. Improves Customer Relations
To build up good customer relations you need to be able to solve your customers’ pain points. A pain point is a recurring issue that your customer is having trouble with, Live chat can give you direct info on these pain points while your customer is on your site.
This is perfect for customer relations because it gives you all the information you need to create a great customer experience. By addressing the customers’ pain point you are providing them with the customer service they need and helping maintain positive relations with them.
As well as an immediate individual solution, live chat can also help create universal long term solutions. Chat allows you to log all your customer interactions and therefore compile a portfolio of reoccurring pain points. If you see the same pain points arising again and again, then you know exactly how to improve your business’ overall customer relations strategy.
4. It Saves You Money
Research has shown that switching from call-center based customer service to chat will work well for your bottom line. A study by Forrester showed chat-based customer service to be up to 30% cheaper than phone call customer service, not to mention way more convenient.
Chat is less expensive because live chat agents can handle up to 3 conversations at one time. This benefit is known as “chat concurrency”, and it allows fewer employees to handle a larger workload by utilizing the technology available.
5. Competitive Advantages
A study by TELUS International found that the majority of major companies are yet to implement a live chat feature onto their websites. Out of 1,000 websites, only 9% of them were supporting their customers via a live chat application.
All this to say, you are in a prime position to get ahead of the crowd by installing chat software on your website. Taking this competitive advantage over the competition will also present more opportunities for customer engagement. A great example of this is zodiaccasino.com, their customer support service includes a 24/7 live chat that keeps their customers happy and engaged.
6. Increases Efficiency
When analyzing your own customer support performance, email and phone calls offer limited and hard to reach findings. This is one of the areas that chat can excel in. Live chat gives you the ability to mine data in a comprehensive way.
For example, you will be able to discover the number of visitors your site receives, and the number of chat requests that are answered or unanswered. More performance-based data means more insight into the efficiency of your customer service.
The efficiency of your customer service is crucial to the long term success of your business, digging deep into your chat analytics will help you streamline the process and keep your customers happy.
7. Time-Saving
Through their inside knowledge of your website, chat agents are able to help customers find exactly what they need. There is probably a wealth of useful information on your site that is difficult for a new customer to find. With live chat, agents can direct customers to helpful links and training documents quickly and efficiently. This will also save the agent time as they can provide pre-made troubleshooting documents as opposed to walking a customer through a step by step process.
However, if they do need to provide step-by-step assistance, new screen-sharing capabilities can make light work of any problems. This kind of quick response time saving simply cannot be done through phone or email customer service.
Key Take-Aways
There are multiple benefits to implementing a live chat application on your company website. Being able to offer your customers live support without the need for costly call-center agents or cumbersome email correspondence is a turning point in online business.
Implementing this system to your strategy puts you ahead of the curve. This new approach to customer service is both popular and effective. Any business can benefit from saving time and money.
