Live chat is truly the untapped potential for businesses to drill in on customer insights, wants and needs to win the sale, simply by offering a 24/7 channel for leads and customers on your website. The best part is, research shows most websites have yet to implement a live chat strategy. The opportunity here is huge, so if you haven't installed a live chat feature on your website yet, we're here to educate you on why your business needs it!
Remember this post where our partner, AC of Drips, talked about how important it is to keep the conversation flowing and to have some channel in place that reaches out to your leads when they inquire on your website... even when your business is offline after-hours! Chat is a simple solution to the issue of being available 24/7 for your customers. Whether it's your internal customer support team, or an outsourced business, someone should always be available to chat with your leads and customers on your website. Here are the most important reasons you need chat on your website now.
1. Visitors have an important question they can't answer
Your agents or customer support team can answer that question, whether it's about a specific feature your product offers, or what the pricing plan entails. Live chat makes it easy for agents to talk back and forth with website visitors with no pressure to buy and without the annoyance of talking on the phone. More times than not, answering that question will lead to a sale!
2. It shortens response time
Live chat removes the need for back and forth emails or phone calls to answer questions that can delay the sales process by days or even weeks. Response time is drastically reduced and inquiries are handled in a matter of seconds, in real-time. Live chat can support your business towards becoming more customer-driven, which is the direction you should be prioritizing in 2017.
73% of customers are satisfied after using live chat, higher than any other form of customer support such as email, telephone or social media, according to Zopim.
3. Use chat transcripts to improve your website
Improve interactions and website value by monitoring each chat transcript that comes through. This way, if there are common questions asked by visitors, you can catch on to these trends early on and add that information to your website and marketing materials. This kind of business intelligence is invaluable as you grow and scale; you have direct feedback from your customers on what works, what needs improvement and what they'd like to see.
4. It reduces cost
The agents handling live chat conversations are able to host multiple chat windows at once, meaning you don't need to employ as many customer service agents within your business, which saves money. As your team members become more capable and trained using live chat, the more valuable and scalable this feature will become for your business. Live chat also lowers average interaction cost through quicker handle time.
5. Consistency and availability builds trust
When customers and leads can easily access your website and get in contact with you, they will inherently trust you and the way you operate. This trust can go a long way; from closing the sale, to dealing with any customer or technical issues... everything is much easier to handle when there is a solid foundation of trust between the customer and business.
