Are You Available When Your Online Customers Need You The Most?

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Imagine walking into the largest car dealership in your city. You have thousands of dollars to spend, but when you do walk in, there is nobody to reach out to you and ask what you are looking for. Would you still be enthusiastic buying from there? Customer experience is mostly about being there for your customers when they need you.

This is a problem mostly for your web visitors. Regardless of the number of helpful pages and FAQs you may have on your product, there are still questions that a visitor may want answered before they make the purchase. This is the reason why a number of websites have the live chat feature available on their website. There are three ways you can make yourself available to the customer:

Live Chat : This is by far the most popular among online websites. It allows a small team to handle multiple sales enquiries at the same time. There are a number of online tools like Olark and ClickDesk that lets your online sales team to chat with multiple prospects at the same time and help them decide on the right product. These tools also enable you to post an automated welcome message to your visitors so that they know who to talk to in case they have a question. Here is a snapshot from ecommerce platform provider, PureChat.

Courtesy : PureChat.com

Toll-Free Call : Advertising a toll-free number across your websites can make it easier for your customers to reach out. Make sure your sales team is large enough to handle the volume of inbound calls. Prospects are likely to hang up if they are not able to reach out within a couple of minutes. Toll-free calls are ideal for medium and large sized businesses like insurance and loans. Here is a snapshot of how a mortgage firm like LowVARates.com does it.

Courtesy : LowVARates.com

Live Call : This is by far the least used alternative – unlike a phone number, the ‘live call’ feature enables users to set up an instant VoIP call over the website. This is much easier for the visitor than it is to pick up a phone and dial in your toll-free number. Services like Zingaya and Agendize are some of the popular services offering this feature. Since this requires an one-on-one call, this feature is ideal for businesses that offer a high margin product to a small number of customers. Web hosting services are an ideal target. Here is a snapshot from Steadfast, a web hosting service

Courtesy : Steadfast.net

There is no way to satisfy all your customers. Old timers would clearly prefer a traditional toll-free line over an online call while the tech-savvy lot would prefer chatting with the sales team online over actually talking to someone. It is always a good idea to offer as many alternatives as possible in order to enable customers of all kinds to be able to reach out to you.

No matter how comprehensive your website content is, visitors still have questions – more often than not, visitors do not want to read through the dozens of pages to get their couple of questions answered. It is hence very important that businesses have live support for both sales and after-sales calls. Customer experience is all about keeping your patrons happy. A quick and easy reachout is the first step in ensuring a great experience. What are your thoughts?

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