Looking for benefits of live chat that can convince you to adopt a tool for it?
Guess what? You’ve landed at the right place!
Today, customers no longer rely on just one option to fulfill their needs. They are exposed to various products daily, each promising exceptional features and functionality.
So, why should existing and potential customers choose your product?
A large part of the answer lies in the user experience while contacting the tool’s customer support team. One bad experience, and it’s undeniably a deal breaker.
A live chat software doesn’t only help to improve your leads but also offers a platform for your operators to help visitors walk through the sales funnel. The business chat solution does everything from instant answers to real-time support.
So, say goodbye to dissatisfied customers and pull the gear to delightful customer experiences.
This blog will delve into 12 live chat benefits and some expert tips that will help take customer relationships a notch higher.
12 Benefits of Using Live Chat for Your Website
So, let’s get to the crux of this blog right away – the top live chat benefits.
1. Provide an Instant & Convenient Route of Communication
Customers want their queries to be resolved comfortably and want it now!
Convenience is undeniably one of the benefits of live chat with customers. This stands true because live chat:
- Connects Customers with the Right Operator Instantly
Let’s understand this better with an example of ProProfs, a complete live chat solution for businesses of all sizes and scales.
Once you enable a pre-chat form to the chat window, you can easily personalize the customer journey. Start by modifying the header and the screen message that will be visible to the customer.
Put in your question. This question may be in the form of a text, radio, checkbox, or a dropdown list. You can even add to your company’s privacy policy. Besides, you can make a particular question mandatory to answer by enabling the ‘Required’ option.
Also, the form allows you to add the department field to automatically route your visitors to the correct operators for a quick issue resolution.
The tool allows you to customize the form how you want it to appear to the customer.
- Enables Customers to Multitask
With live chat, customers can continue with their ongoing work as they await a response from the live chat operator.
Yes, the response is quick, but sometimes, the operator may have to look deeply into some data to help you find a solution.
So, no matter how long the conversation takes to end, customers still get the opportunity to do their work while live chat takes place on the side.
- Reduces Response Time
Solving a customer’s query over live chat helps reduce response time. This is because live chat allows the customer support operator to send page links to the customer.
So, all the customer needs to do is click on the link, which will direct them to a page that fulfills their requirement. This is impossible over the phone, and accessing a specific page may take sufficient time for both the operator and the customer.
Also, the operator can reply to the customer with the help of previously-framed canned responses. These responses are created and kept ready to be used in a chat.
These are ready-to-use answers to the most common questions. This reduces the operator’s typing effort. This also ensures no typos or grammatical errors while responding faster.
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To sum up, real-time support helps your website visitors convert into long-term customers, which is the result of the benefits of live chat to a customer.
2. Improve Retention & Increase Conversion Rate
Next on the list of benefits of having a live chat on the website are better retention and conversion rates.
But, how do the benefits of live chat impact the sales team’s performance?
Well, live chat tools have the potential to create a delightful customer experience, but at the same time, they can also help in increasing conversions.
For this, live chat software options like ProProfs Chat offer Chat Greetings that help your operators provide proactive support to customers and address the problem in advance before it gets raised by the customer.
You can do this by monitoring the customer’s behavior in real-time. This way, you can initiate automated or manual chats and provide a personalized experience throughout.
3. Improve Website Experience
Imagine how it would be for your customers who’d expect to land upon the correct page listed in the SERPs, and the moment they open the link, they see a 404-page error. Now, this not only frustrates your customers but also leads to the following actions:
- They leave your website immediately, hopping onto another one (Yes, your competitor!)
- They exit your website feeling lost due to a lack of support.
- They have lost their precious time trying to navigate your website.
Solution?
How about adding a live chat window that pops up when a visitor lands on the 404 page?
While redirection may take more time for implementation just in case the correct page is under improvement or is yet to be created; it is still a great idea to add a chat box to such pages.
Enabling live chat customer service on such pages will help you to:
- Keep your website visitors from being disappointed with your website’s functionality
- Retain visitors as they can connect with one of your operators and get answers to their queries.
4. Build Consistency to Support Process
One of the benefits of having a live chat on the website is that it helps a business bring consistency to the support processes.
When you monitor your visitors in real-time, you get to know whether they arrived at your website with a purchase intent or not. But most of all, the online chat benefits are to:
- understand customers’ needs from the brand by assessing the pages they’ve browsed
- make your operators more proactive as they can see when a visitor gets stuck on a page
Thus, consistency is built by tracking visitors’ activity via this live chat plugin and acting accordingly. This also helps improve the overall website experience for your visitors.
5. Save Significant Time
Among the key benefits of live chat for business is that it saves significant time for both the customer and the customer support operator.
Think about it. Doesn’t the customer care waiting tune frustrate you and make you want to end the call immediately, hoping to call back later when the line is free?
Thankfully, live chat eliminates this waiting time and instantly sets the customer up for a conversation. In addition, it enables the operator to address concerns faster with unique customer information and ready-made canned responses. This further allows the operator to manage multiple chats simultaneously while reducing the response time significantly.
Read Also: How to Handle Multiple Chats at the Same Time
6. Refer to Previous Conversations and Avoid Repetition
Imagine if a customer has to repeat their problems at different checkpoints and to different operators. This will certainly irritate them, and they will lose their interest in the tool’s services sooner or later.
Sites with live chat help put an end to these scenarios. A chat support system allows easy access to a customer’s entire chat history in the form of ‘Transcripts.’ With these, you can access when the customer last reached out for a live chat session, with whom, and what they discussed.
This helps avoid repetition by the customer and initiates conversation right from where the previous one ended!
7. Integrate Live Chat for CRM Opportunities
Integrating live chat with CRM can help you get leads and a competitive advantage.
How?
First, it saves you ample time in trying to feed in basic customer information like name, contact, address, etc.
Second, it gives you access to a pool of information about a customer’s previous sales history or choice. Besides, integrating live chat with CRM also allows you to automate tasks and reminders, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
Read Also: The CRM Implementation Plan: 12 Step Strategy Process
8. Send Targeted Messages
An online chat customer support helps you collate data and leverage it to positively impact your conversation with users.
It gives you complete data on whether the customer is a new or returning visitor. This helps approach the conversation so that it fulfills the customer’s requirements.
It also gives insight into their website behavior, like how many times they have previously visited your website. Thus, a personalized conversation helps build trust and feeds a high satisfaction level for the customer.
9. Categorize Customer Pain Points
How can the support team help capture more leads?
They can do this by understanding the common pain points of the customer. Each customer is unique and seeks a solution that caters to their needs.
Adding a live chat to the website is an excellent way to identify and categorize issues for easier management.
With live chat history and activity, you can quickly grasp what challenge the customer is facing and where they are stuck while navigating your website. This enables you to act proactively and direct the chat to a specialized operator right at the start.
Read Also: 10 Best Customer Service Channels to Improve Your Customer Experience
10. Reduce Support Costs
Yes, customer service online chat can reduce support costs!
Let’s take a scenario. A support operator who deals in calls with a customer can only hold one call at a time. Thus, the call operator directs their attention toward only one customer at a time.
On the other hand, an operator responsible for handling customer queries over chat can efficiently multitask and solve questions for 5-6 customers simultaneously. This translates to fewer operators and, thus, reduced customer support costs.
11. Increase Website Engagement
If a visitor comes to your website and isn’t able to find the answers they are looking for, they are most likely to shut your website down and open your competitors’ websites. Is that all right? Definitely not!
Here is when a live chat functionality comes into the picture. Its window pops up and caters to your questions right at that moment!
This helps reduce your website’s bounce rate and enables an interactive engagement between the customer and your operator.
You can implement eye-catching strategies like deploying buttons with ‘Chat Now!’ or ‘Leave Message’ messages. You can even customize the chat window to animate the chat buttons to grab customers’ attention. Also, you can use the ‘Eye Catchers’ feature to highlight the chat buttons as you like.
12. Access Your Operator’s Performance
As a customer success manager, you also need performance data on your operators as much as you require data on customer behavior, right?
A live chat solution captures critical data like total chats received, missed chats, average chat rating, and average response time without a hitch.
This system offers chat reports that help gain insight into your operators’ performance. This is important as it provides helpful feedback to employees to improve existing processes for enhanced customer experience.
You can grab how well a live chat went by setting up a survey post chat.
You simply have to go to ‘Settings’ and select the ‘Post Chat’ option under the ‘Chat Window’ section.
With this, you can go on to select the features and functionality you deem fit to gather customer feedback accurately.
You can also select the ‘Reports’ feature on the tool’s dashboard and then click on ‘Operator’ on the side window. This will provide a big-picture view of all your operators’ activity and performance.
This analysis offers a deep dive into every aspect of your operators’ performance, enabling you to provide feedback or rectify existing processes for better and optimized employee productivity.
These were the top 12 benefits of having a live chat on the website. Get started with a reliable live chat software today and see the benefits unfold from the word go!
The Best Advice from 10 Customer Experience Experts
We understand that sometimes, you need that extra push from someone to start acting on a particular game plan. So, let’s look at what customer experience experts say about enhancing user experience.
- Recently eConsultancy conducted a survey that found Live Chat generates the highest satisfaction -73% – of any customer service channel.
- Whenever a customer is doing business with you, they want a frictionless experience. Live Chat provides a very responsive channel where you can get issues resolved immediately. It equates to a real-time response which is what customers expect. In addition, Live Chat can actually help improve your overall buying experience by proactively helping you at various touch points such as while you are browsing products or at checkout. And any time you can reduce the path to purchase for a customer it is always a good thing.
- Of course, if you do promote Live Chat on your website, make sure it is operational. The worst thing you can do is say you have Live Chat but when a customer selects it, it isn’t functional. Make sure you deliver on the promise. If you offer it, make sure it works.
Easily build a seamless experience with live chat to resolve queries in real time and improve customer delight rate.Tweet this
- Live Chat for website can be a great way of ‘engaging’ with customers as an ‘option’ for them…. if that’s what they want!
- It should be very much seen as an ‘option’ rather than the answer to all problems.
- The ‘chat’ should be responsive and done in the style, language, and tone of the customer – it should look and ‘feel’ personalized to that individual.
Engage in a tone with customers that is more personalized and be more responsive with live chat on your website.Tweet this
- Chatbots do not create lasting impressions with your customers. Is C-3PO going to be able to upsell a customer on another product/service your company makes because of his positive interactions with them? Definitely not.
- Customers are growing savvier and can detect a chatbot almost in seconds. Visitors to your site will quickly grow annoyed with the lack of personal attention and move on.
- Live chat provides the warmth, intuition, and instincts that only humans have. Add that to an instantaneous interaction platform (chat) in an instant gratification world, and you have a powerful combination to impress and wow your customers.
- People are increasingly hesitant to call. Think about your own experience – aren’t you more likely to text someone than call them? Customers would rather email, text, or chat than hop on the phone as the initial point of contact.
- Live chat gives your customers an avenue to talk to an expert in your company who can build a relationship with them, however brief.
- Depending on your implementation, what the customer has been doing on the site before they chat with someone. That gives your live chat reps incredible insight on helping the customer and what else they might be interested in. Your reps should use that to their advantage!
Customers may not experience the same warmth and instincts while receiving a solution from a chatbot yet when compared to a live agent. Tweet this
- Greater satisfaction- Different customers have different preferences when it comes to the communication channels they use. Adding live chat software to your website will increase the satisfaction of those customers who prefer that channel.
- Conversation record- Live chat for website typically allows customers to download a transcript of the conversation once it is finished. This is a great feature when the conversation has included a commitment from the business.
- Greater customer productivity- Self-service websites and FAQ pages are great when inquiries are simple in nature because there’s no waiting – customers can quickly achieve their objective. Sometimes though, inquiries may be more complex and customers need to speak to someone. So they hunt around for your number (which you’ve buried deep on your website to reduce the load on your call center), then work your way through your 4 level IVR, then wait in a queue all the while tying up their phone line and/or being distracted by your hold music. Live chat software enables customers to quickly start a conversation and if there’s a queue, allowing them to continue doing what they’re doing on their laptop or phone. The software will let them know when an agent is available. For them, it’s a more productive way of waiting in line.
Reaching your customers becomes simple with live chat on your website. Plus it helps your customers boost productivity and speak to the concerned person in charge.Tweet this
- It resonates with a significant demographic that is familiar with messaging apps, and so has important customer engagement potential.
- It also facilitates text analysis as a bridge to obtaining robust voice of customer (VoC) insight.
- When done right (e.g. Emirates in my personal experience) it is without a doubt an ideal means of creating empathy and reducing customer effort, two crucial Customer Experience attributes to grow and protect.
Live chat takes your business and customer support service one step closer towards automation while maintaining the empathy towards visitors.Tweet this
- Since texting and social media have made short messages the mainstream method of communication, live chat for website is now being adopted and deployed by more companies across more channels than ever before to improve the customer experience. Here are four reasons why more and more brands are deciding it’s time to chat with their customers:
- Convenience: Chat allows today’s hyper-connected customers to stay online, avoid IVRs and call queues, and multitask while they’re seeking customer service – all keys to convenience which is a huge consideration for today’s consumer. Not only is service via live chat fast and immediately accessible, but it’s typically more personalized than other forms of online service, too – resulting in higher customer satisfaction rates.
- Cost Efficiency: Live chat is a cost-conscious choice for organizations that want to provide more personalized service options. Customers get one-on-one assistance from a live customer service representative at their convenience, while companies save because behind the scenes, agents can handle multiple chats simultaneously. Chat is also known to increase first contact resolution rates.
- Functionality: Companies can utilize live chat in a game, on a form, in an application, as part of their knowledge base or with an online shopping cart. It can even be deployed on a brand’s Facebook page – and on the pages of their brand’s website with the highest exit rates.
- Increased Sales: Chat not only keeps consumers from abandoning online shopping carts and order forms, but it can also be an upselling and cross-selling tool. Agents can view a customer’s purchase and service history and suggest related products and services, or upgrades, during the chat.
Watch for the chat to continue its rise as a preferred customer service channel as more and more time- and convenience-conscious consumers turn to it for prompt, yet personalized service.Tweet this
Often B2B is separated from B2C, and it makes sense regarding target audiences. What is unfortunate that often that also includes separating people from business. It is almost like a company has a life of its own (which it legally speaking has); however, companies are formed of people doing work (and using systems, websites, and all kinds of things while doing it). Such thinking leads to a bias where in many cases business people are treated differently, and worse than consumers would be. Thus, the importance of live chat software on a business website comes down to:
- Business is done from people to people, in the B2B context, too, and therefore potential customers need a way to connect with a real person from the company. Live Chat can provide that not only for consumers but for B2B customers, too.
- Typically B2B solutions are quite complex and raise a lot of questions, Live Chat is a great way to clarify those matters promptly (time is money as you know!)
- When you want to know more about some business, product or service, it doesn’t mean you want the whole sales pitch and all the harassment that comes with presenting a simple question! Live chat can be a way to give information for the customer and probe subtly rather than sending your sales guys after them.
B2B businesses will benefit from Live Chat solutions as much as consumer businesses do. If not even more!Tweet this
- It will help you connect more with customers. Think of a website as a storefront and Live Chat as the perfect store employee. I use perfect because you can set it up such that the interaction level is goldilocks not too hot, not too cold.
- It will increase sales conversion. I had a client that had a 98% online business but everything else staying the same introducing live chat lifted conversion by 2 points. Live chat makes customers feel more comfortable whether they are buying digitally or not.
- It’s the right thing to do for a frictionless customer experience. No one wants to have to start and interaction online only to have to call if they have a question!
With live chat, connect more and instantly, increase sales, and provide a delightful customer experience. Tweet this
- The success of any communication channel that you provide your customers lies in their ability to quickly and efficiently resolve their issue. Live chat can be an amazing service to your customers, but your intention in how it gets designed and executed should be mainly on providing delightful customer service and not cost reduction. While cost reduction can be an outcome of your experience design – the intention to serve will ensure that you design a practical solution for your customer.
- The questions you should ask: “Is this the right channel for my customers to find a solution? Do I have the resources, bandwidth, and technology to empower my live chat agents to provide my customers with a solution from simple to the more complex? Does this channel align with the overall end-to-end experience I want to deliver to my customers?”
- For a live chat to be effective, the agent should provide a natural conversation that is responsive, quickly identifies the cause, and provides a solution that does not require the customer to move to another communication channel for resolution. Agents should be empowered to support the full spectrum of support from easy to more complicated. Selecting the right technology that supports a compelling end-to-end solution is critical to the success of the live chat. Customers trained by messaging apps, expect the ability to have asynchronous communication that allows for distractions from their every-day life.If this is a chat in a technical support environment, the transcript of the resolution should be provided to the customer so that they can incorporate that solution into their knowledge base. Selecting the right technology to support the designed experience enables a live chat that delights customers with a quick and easy path to resolution.
Selecting the right technology that supports a compelling end-to-end solution is critical to the success of the live chat. Tweet this
- Being on hold with an ‘estimated wait time’ is no longer acceptable for today’s increasingly sophisticated buyer. If a prospect or customer can resolve a query within a few moments and online without ever having to pick up the phone, why would they choose to talk to someone? Chat allows companies to anticipate customer needs and build pre-built answers in their chat platforms to allow for a faster, seamless customer experience. This quick self-help offering can often deflect a chat interaction and/or phone call altogether. Digital transformation, including the adoption of live chat software, is necessary when you put your customer needs at the core of your business and real-time, in-platform customer service at the tip of the user’s hands.
Chat allows companies to anticipate customer needs and build pre-built answers for a seamless customer experience.Tweet this
What we Learned From Experts – Importance of Live Chat Software
From every expert what we’ve gathered as a final takeaway is the importance of live chat on your website.
As a business, you get to connect with people efficiently if you place a live chat for a business website. Not only does it help to improve your leads, but it also offers you a platform for your operators to help visitors walk through the sales funnel. From instant answers to real-time support, the chat solution for businesses does it all. No more do you have to witness a scenario where visitors leave your website with dissatisfaction and a bad experience in mind.
While understanding the importance of live chat on a website, you also get to learn how your operator can provide a personalized and humanized experience to site visitors, thereby building a lasting impression of your brand in the market. The avenue also allows your visitors to communicate directly with an expert at your company, which in return helps them come back to the same place for their other product-related queries too.
Read More: 4 Reasons Why You Should Implement Live Chat on Your Website Now
What’s more? Your operators get to save visitor data as leads which they later can nurture over a period of time and ultimately convert them into buyers with the live chat tool in place. With so much to look out for in a chat software, there is no way you can avoid its integration to your business website.
So next time, when you ask yourself “why is live chat important?”, think about these benefits. Adding a live support chat tool at your website, you ensure to never miss a potential customer and increase your chances of boosting sales.
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