Do Online Businesses Really Need Live Chat Support?

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From exploring options to buying products or services, a customer journey is usually fraught with anxiety and friction. Research shows that 77% online consumers prefer to connect with a real person prior making a purchase. A connection can establish through email, phone, live chat and or social media channels. But majority of the customers (73%) are of the view live chat proffers highest level of satisfaction as compared to email (61%), social media (48%) and phone (44%).

Yet, many online businesses have not been able to profit from live chat as one would have expected. A major reason behind it is a lot of them have failed to create awareness about the availability of the new support channel among the customers. Thus, they fail to encourage their clients to use the new customer service option.

While others integrate the live chat feature in the internal pages of the website which makes it tough for their customers to find the feature and benefit from the tool. However, if it is effectively used live chat can greatly contribute to your business growth.

Here are 4 key benefits you will immediately observe after installing live chat software to your website. Obviously, after making your existing customers and online visitors aware of the new contact option available to them.

i. Pave Way for Affiliations and Partnerships

Live chat not only allow your customers to easily connect with the support staff, but also enables you to make your business more transparent. As you can instantly address the customer concerns and monitor the performance of the support team. Increase in transparency can win you the trust of customers as well as companies. This will pave way for business affiliations and partnerships.

Affiliate program of live chat service can be of great assistance in this regard. You can leverage it to connect with the clients of your clients and gain the opportunity to boost your revenue stream. Above all, you can use it to lay the foundation for future projects and expansion of business offerings and services.

ii. Provide Customer Behavior Insight

The high point of chat software is it provides insight into customer behavior. As it keeps a log of everything ranging from time spent on a page, number of visits, geographical location, operating systems used by the visitors and etc. Such information aid businesses in developing an understanding for customer behavior, which greatly benefit entrepreneurs in creating marketing programs that are specifically tailored around the needs of their customers.

iii. Cuts Customer Support Costs

The cost of a single interaction over live chat is way cheaper than other customer service channels. According to a Forrester study, a single live chat session costs about $10 whereas a single phone service costs $33. On the other hand, Gartner pointed out that live chat costs no more than ¼ of a phone transaction.

And that’s not all, live chat requires less manpower as compared to other support channels. Since a single support agent can handle numerous chats at the same time. Furthermore, technically it’s not that difficult to install live chat software into your website. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with your CRM system.

iv. Decipher Customer Needs

Imagine if you already know what a customer is exactly looking for. With live chat software now you can turn this dream into reality. Today there are many instant support software that can help you decipher your customers’ needs. Such an information enables you to timely engage potential customers through live chat session and convert them into loyal consumers of your products and or services.

Adam Methew
Professional in Corporate Communication and Digital Marketing, Adam Methew's area of expertise include Customer Service, Digital Marketing & Branding, Entrepreneurship, Growth Management, Ownership Strategy, and Growth Strategies. Adam has offered his contributions as a "Valuable Contributor" for www.LiveAdmins.com and other valuable blogs.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Hi Adam,

    This is a great post and thank you for sharing such vital statistics in the cost difference between phone calls and chat sessions. I use live chat for my website but I never really focused on the costs of phone calls and chat sessions. I did witness profits but I really did not know that I was saving that much money! Thank you!

    Cheers!

  2. Great article – Adam – it is sometimes hard to convince clients of the cost benefit in particular and I never thought about the fact that of course its much cheaper than phone as you can assist more than one customer at a time. Great point! I will be using that more often talking to new clients particularly in some of the new markets I am broaching.

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