You don’t have to be a sales and marketing guru to understand that high quality customer service plays a crucial role in your business. Your customers and employees are the ones who champion and ambassador your cause and help grow your customer overall base.
For several years now, ecommerce websites have been adding live chat support to their help desk software in order to provide real time answers rather than having customers leave their websites. Real time chatting with a customer support expert not only builds the customers’ confidence during their shopping experience, but also assists improving your overall conversion rates. According to a recent study and survey of US online consumers, 68% of customers engage in live chat and 63% of them prefer getting back to a website with live chat for repeat purchase. That’s a seriously high percentage.
In the past year or two the spread of live chat has become even more popular and necessary. It’s no longer just for retail or ecommerce. Today with more and more research and interaction taking place online it’s imperative that any companies capture site and social visitors REAL TIME. Even future employees researching your business or current employees exploring and interacting fall under this umbrella. Live chat is for employee retention, employee experience, recruiting, sales, customer service, technical support and more. People want real time answers from someone and if you aren’t on the leading edge of all this you’re missing the boat!
Here are 5 reasons why live chat is beneficial for your business today:
1. Real Time Convenience
The first advantages that live chat has to offer is its convenience for customers and employees. A Forrester research found that 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live agent while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer.
It’s time to change who you think of as an online consumer two. Historically there were two types of customers who need help and use live chat to get it. The first are potential buyers, and these are the most common situations in which potential online customers use live chat:
• They want to know more about product specifications
• They’re having trouble finding specific item on a given website
• They want to compare products
These scenarios enormously influence purchase decisions. In fact, more than 38% of online customers took their purchase decision due to live chat session. Remember, that chat agents play a huge role and if they are properly trained, they can easily generate more sales.
The second group of live chat users are your current customers. The most common reasons why they use live chat are:
• They want to know the status of their order
• They want to ask about Return Policies
• They want to report bugs or suggest improvements in your service
The newest need for live chat revolves around current employees and potential employees. Let’s take the latter first. The job market is tight and finding good people isn’t easy. Most companies spend a good amount of money to drive people to their website, job pages or social sites for recruiting. Leveraging live chat in your talent acquisition process gives your company the opportunity to connect with these talent people real time. The most common reasons why they need live chat are:
• They want to know more about the job
• They want to ask questions about the company
• They want a faster answer regarding their qualifications
• They want to learn more about the culture
Another nice perk of live chat is that you can get nearly instant feedback or notifications when there’s a wide-scale customer-facing problem. For instance, if you run a SaaS business, and anything goes wrong, live chat gives you an immediate view of the issue from your customers’ perspective.
2. Live Chat Saves Money
4 reasons live chat is now cost efficient:
• It increases efficiency by allowing live chat agents handle multiple chats simultaneously, thus you don’t need to hire more agents. Intelligent live chat allows multiple options for chat distribution and utilization.
• It increases the average order value, since customers get real time advice and answers to any questions they might have. It saves “product return” expenses as a live chat representative can help you pick the right product or service, which suits the customer best, thus he or she will be satisfied with it and won’t need to return it back.
• It reduces overall helpdesk center costs by lowering the waiting queue time.
• It reduces recruiting costs because prospective employees get real time conversations to answer their questions and your get real time contact with important talent.
3. It’s Your Competitive Advantage
It’s never been more important to stand out among your competitors as it is today. The amount of business rivals is tremendous and is increasing every day. Not only small and medium-sized businesses are recognizing the importance of providing real time customer service, but also corporations like Amazon, Toyota, Delta Airlines, and many more are using live chat to be one step ahead of competition.
4. Increase Conversions Rates!!!!
Having a real person walk you through a purchase adds confidence and customers tend to spend more than the ones who don’t use live chat. A positive experience leads to a higher average order value. Simply put, your sales are directly affected by live chat.
Multiple studies have proven that offering live chat can bring a 20%+ increase in conversion rates. Would you like a 20% increase to your conversion rate?
The key to success in conversion increase is having representatives who are properly trained or experts. Provide them with insightful knowledge about your products, so they can recommend additional purchases that may be the perfect fit for that particular customer. Equip them with discount coupons, which they can offer to customers who are still hesitating before purchase. This is taking your sales team to the leading edge looks like!
5. Build long-term relationships
Satisfied, long-term customers are statistically less likely to switch. As an added bonus, they tend to be less price-sensitive. Experts say that customers who feel taken care of are less concerned about what they are paying.
63% of customers who’ve purchased using live chat tend to come back rather than the ones who don’t. Studies show that regular customers tend to buy more often and they are less expensive to maintain because of their familiarity with your business and the processes behind it.
When customers feel their voice is heard and they chat with a person behind the company, it’s more likely that they’ll have a stronger connection to your business and share their positive experience.
Here are some additional thoughts about having live chat agents:
Play the human card – the whole point of having live chat is bringing human help to customer’s online experience. Providing robotic responses can kill the effectiveness of live chat. Bots can help but they’re not a full answer.
Learn from your customers – analyze and track the most common issues which customers face. Capturing the data necessary for this allows you to make real educated changes that align in lockstep with your employees/customers’ needs. You can also track your performance and make budgetary projections to adequately run your business, internally and externally.
BUT HOLD UP…. Live Chat Support may not be your thing.?.?
Live chat undeniably is an effective way to communicate to your customers and employees. But how do you staff for all this? How do you manage all that technology? How do you tie all this into your marketing, HR, Sales and Operational departments?
The technology behind live chat is easy to find. The challenge is in executing on it. That’s why your best option may be to outsource this type of work. Contracting a contact center fluent in this specific field allows for a number of benefits.
1. You don’t have to hire additional staff.
2. You don’t have to maintain the technology.
3. You don’t have to manage it.
4. You shorten your learning curve.
5. You gain industry expertise real time, daily.
6. It’s more cost effective and has a trackable ROI.
If you are looking for a company to support and partner with you on this Leading Edge Connections can help! We have agents ready and standing by to take your customer and employee experience to the Leading Edge of Awesome!
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