Today’s customers expect the ability to communicate with brands in multiple formats. No longer can you get by with only offering email or a toll-free number. You must also add features such as live chat and social media engagement if you want to compete with all the other businesses in your field.
Surveys show businesses that offer live chat increase customer loyalty, and customers spend an average of $500 more a month. However, a poor live chat experience is almost worse than not having a live chat at all. So, if you decide to go all-in and offer live chat, make sure it is the best experience possible for your customers. Hire and fully train live agents, so they are familiar with your customer service philosophies.
Are you still unsure if you want to add live chat as a feature? Here are 10 reasons why it will make your customers happier:
1. Remove Hold Times
People don’t like waiting on hold on the telephone. Around 79 percent of consumers say they prefer using live chat to get their questions answered. People hate waiting on hold or interacting with an automated phone system. Live chat gives them the ability to work on other tasks while waiting to connect with an agent. Ideally, though, your live chat wait times are next to nothing.
2. Answer Questions During Purchases
Around 44 percent of customers say having a question answered in real-time while they are in the middle of an online purchase is one of the best features of live chat. There’s an old sales rule that you must do your best to complete the purchase while the customer is in front of you. A customer who goes away is very unlikely to return. The same principle holds for online retailers, although you can email them if you collect their info. Still, the best scenario is getting them to complete the order, and offering live chat encourages them to finish the purchase.
Overstock Artoffers beautiful oil paintings. If a customer has a question before completing the purchase, there is a handy live chat feature in the bottom right of each page of the site. You can pull up the chat at any point in the buying process and get an immediate response.
3. Create a Good Customer Experience
Even if you only install a chatbot to answer repetitive and simple questions, you improve the customer experience (CX) because you provide a simple way for customers to interact with your site. The bot itself talks the customer through the experience, asking questions and gathering information along the way.
4. Add a Personalized Experience
Features such as knowledge bases or automated email responses don’t offer a personalized experience for users. However, live chat with agents, and you suddenly have a platform that speaks to that individual customer. Pull up the customer’s order history, and you can further customize responses to meet the needs of each buyer.
All Points Fasteners offers a personalized live chat that immediately connects you with a live agent the minute you start the conversation. You are given the first name of the agent and can include all the details you’d like and even upload attachments. Also, when the chat is over, you can email a copy of the chat to yourself for future reference.
5. Offer Immediacy
One of the most convenient parts of live chat is that it offers immediacy to your online visitors. People might have every intention of phoning you later to ask a question or making their way back to your website, but life is hectic and it’s easy to get distracted. When you offer live chat right there, the person can immediately take action and get the answer they seek. This can help increase your conversion rates.
6. Speed Up Response Time
Many people get aggravated with a company’s response time when they have an issue. Train your live chat agents to handle customer complaints quickly and effectively. If a customer gets an almost immediate resolution to a complaint, they are much more likely to give your business another chance in the future and tell others about the good customer service they received.
Taylor & Hart offers a choice to “Speak to Us” within their navigation bar. The user is then offered a choice of phoning, finding a location, emailing, using WhatsApp or starting a live chat. The sheer number of communication choices speeds up how fast the company responds to users.
7. Provide More Availability
You might not be able to afford full-time, around the clock employees to man phone lines or keep your stores open 24/7, but you can enlist the services of contract live agents to answer simple questions on your website. This expands your reach and makes communication convenient for your customers no matter their schedules or time zones.
8. Sustain Value
Live chat doesn’t have the ongoing maintenance costs of phone support. While costs vary based on volume and level of training for live agents, the overall cost of live chat is much cheaper than some other forms of support. Because of these, brands can reduce operating costs and pass those savings on to customers with better prices or discounts on things such as shipping.
9. Save Time
People today are crazy busy. Anything that saves them time is attractive. Live chats save time a couple of ways. Not only are response times faster than email or waiting on hold, but there is no need to continuously repeat a question or problem because it’s all typed out on the screen. Even if the chat agent must call in another worker with more expertise, they can simply hand the chat over to the new person without losing any of the information already there.
10. Create a Positive Post-Service Experience
A huge advantage of live chat is the ability to create a written transcript of the situation and how it was resolved. If the problem is one that takes more time to fix, you can even follow up and refer back to the chat to make sure you’ve covered all the issues the consumer is concerned over. For situations taken care of immediately, following up with an email to make sure the customer is satisfied still takes the experience of your buyers to a new level and shows them you care deeply about their opinion of your brand.
Add Live Chat Today
If you haven’t already given live chat a try, keep in mind that consumers tend to prefer live chat over almost any other type of customer service format. It’s fast, simple and easy for people to use on their smartphones while on the run or while browsing on their computers. If their work allows it, they can even get in a quick live chat on a break or over their lunch hour. Live chat offers another option that enhances your overall customer service capabilities.
