Customers choose live chat over social media, email, and even phone help when asked about their preferred support methods. Why? Live chat assistance is quick, easy, and handy.
Around 69% of online buyers in the United States expect live chat options on their page, and approximately 73% of consumers consider customer service chat to be the most desirable method of connecting with online firms.
Buyers demand real-time involvement and support be provided as soon as possible. As a result, many organizations are implementing live chat assistance. Yet, more than simply adding live chat capabilities to your website is required. To ensure the effectiveness of your live chat, you must ensure that your support representatives and tools are in sync.
Yet, the advantages of live chat go far beyond simply providing your consumers with a faster and more comfortable means to contact your customer care team.
These are 11 reasons why live chat is winning the war for your client's hearts and minds and why you should immediately add it to your customer care channel.
What Is Live Chat?
Live Chat software lets you communicate with clients in real time without switching between platforms. The days of losing customers due to lengthy phone lines and missing emails in overloaded inboxes are history. The era of disorganized, uncollated customer feedback data is over.
Chatbots are used in live chat programs to automatically respond to simple inquiries, route difficult issues to the appropriate division, and gather and store customer information for subsequent conversations. Chatbots interact with clients during online purchasing, restoring some human sales features lost in the eCommerce industry.
Businesses that have deployed free Live Chat have seen significant reductions in response times without having to hire legions of Customer Service Representatives. This ease of response is partly due to the employment of Chatbots, which react to customers' questions as they are asked, even when people are not accessible. Bots can use keywords to direct clients to useful articles. When a representative can communicate in real time, they may also collect information to help businesses to give the most valuable and efficient experience possible.
The top 11 reasons live chat is the future of customer service
1. Live chat facilitates customer onboarding and acquisition.
Live chat is a fantastic way to communicate with prospective and current consumers and give them the trust they need to use your service or invest thousands in your site. Forrester estimates that chat users have a 2.8 times higher conversion rate than non-users.
Even if your consumers don't need to communicate right then and there, making yourself accessible to them fosters trust.
2. Live chat reduces costs.
The affordability of a live chat WordPress plugin is its second important advantage. How does free live chat help you save money, then?
Efficiency is increased by enabling live chat agents to manage several chats simultaneously. You won't need to hire any more agents as a result. LiveAgent, an intelligent live chat program, offers a variety of choices for distributing and using chat.
When clients receive immediate assistance and responses to any questions they may have, the average order value rises. Because a customer care chat agent may assist you in choosing the ideal good or service for the consumer, it saves on "product return" costs. Because of this, the customer is content and is less inclined to return the item.
It lowers total help desk center costs by reducing waiting queue time compared to a call center.
3. Live chat allows your agents to establish a rapport with the customer.
Agents can study a customer's tone and sentiment during an ongoing chat and modify their styles as necessary. Agents can immediately create rapport and a helpful, friendly relationship by mimicking style or changing formality to match a customer.
Also, messaging systems provide a more genuine method than conventional channels to highlight the personalities of your agents.
4. Live chat offers accessibility and reliability.
When website visitors see that you offer live chat on website, they will feel more secure. This communicates your availability, responsiveness, and interest in their needs.
Individuals value having assistance while traveling.
Also, live chat on website allows you access to extended service hours, including on nights and weekends when contact centers are typically closed.
In the long run, this accessibility pays off in the form of more business and trust.
5. Live chat gives you a competitive edge
Live chat is still a fairly new phenomenon. Because of this, it's not used by most firms, and those that do are generally not getting the most out of it. This is your time to fill the gap and use online live chat to differentiate your company from the competition.
The live chat could provide you the edge or competitive advantage to rule your niche.
6. Live chat has a better ROI.
Live chat services can answer simple questions without the assistance of a live agent. Also, they may gather information and route inquiries to the appropriate departments, significantly reducing the time spent gathering fundamental data and rerouting inquiries between departments.
Consumers experience the same social pressure to buy a product as they would in a store when sales representatives are attentive and focused on selling their goods, according to a recent study studying the impact of live agents on online trip purchases.
Revenue will rise without needing more employees; according to Live Chat, firms made $456 on average for every sale-producing chat. Ultimately, Live Chat can help your cost center become a profit center.
7. Live Chat assists in preventing cart abandonment.
You can program your widget to appear automatically on the checkout page, just like a salesperson would prod a consumer to purchase in person. Also, you can use online live chat to inform clients about online deals. Customers are more likely to complete their purchase if they understand why they are being charged and interact positively with a representative or a bot.
Humans are habitual beings. We are accustomed to receiving assistance while shopping and having genuine interactions with store employees. Why is online self-service required of us? Businesses must take proactive measures to reduce the confusion the internet environment typically brings up during the purchase experience. Just consider how successful your company would be if clients bought the other 80% of carts.
8. Live chat links to social networks in a single messenger.
Adding an online chat feature to the corporate website and integrating social media sites like Facebook and Instagram into the chat can resolve one aspect. Thanks to this, customer service representatives may now handle multiple inquiries simultaneously. Companies still have to take additional steps to address the volume of inbound requests; this is just the first.
9. You can provide 24/7 support through live chat.
If it would be useful to your business, live chat on website support may be available 24/7. If not, schedule it to be available during any other time period you want.
If you extend your instant availability to include the entire day, your clients will have less cause to complain about their unanswered questions. Even if you cannot staff chat around-the-clock, self-service support solutions like a knowledge base filled with information about your product are always open.
Make sure it's quick and simple for customers to access your help documentation if chat isn't an option. People are frequently more than happy to assist themselves but need more knowledge.
10. Data from live chat helps with product decisions.
The amount of information you can gather by offering support through chat is a significant benefit. Depending on your online live chat program, you should be able to store, arrange, and tag chats to filter them for later review.
You may get information that helps your support, product, and marketing teams by spending time to categorize and review discussions upfront.
Create a set of tags that all agents will use, then ask them to tag their chats as a basic beginning point. To help identify recurring issues, consider tagging for feature requests and bugs by inquiry type or topic.
When you categorize by kind, you'll be able to identify the areas of your product that might need updating or additional support materials to assist your customers.
11. Live chat offers quick consumer question resolution.
Today's free live chats include several features. The capability to share links, attachments, and photographs is yet another fantastic advantage of live chat on website. These characteristics give your online chat customer service the tools to answer consumer inquiries effectively.
Explain a guide or the entire process to a client over the phone. Sharing a Knowledgebase article, an article with a video or another attachment with your client might occasionally walk them through everything step-by-step and avoid any uncertainty.
Wrapping Up
Live chat solutions are the most popular option among internet businesses for satisfying customers, fulfilling today's technology standards as a business, and aiding your webshop's ability to develop. The mountain of data supporting this thesis is only bolstered by its present (and growing) popularity.
Customers are becoming more accustomed to living chat technologies today. They not only prefer it, but they also demand it.
Aside from improving the client experience, the potential to boost agent productivity — in conjunction with the data you'll collect — will lead to better success with live chat as part of your customer support strategy.
Live chat sites is the only way to deliver excellent customer service and consistently retain consumers. Set up your free live chat product ahead of the competition and watch your sales and revenue soar.
Are you ready to start communication? Combine your communications with BotPenguin and add free live chat help to your team.
