Furthermore, you may be familiar with the fact that even though live chat and instant messenger applications (such as Facebook and Twitter) do share some similarities – for example, they both allow you to chat and transfer files – these platforms have distinct differences as well.
However, what you may not know is that live chat can provide significant benefits to your business in comparison to other communication methods, such as email, phone support, instant messenger services, etc.
The purpose of this blog post is to explore the reasons why live chat is a must-have tool for your business, as well as the key benefits of live chat software. This article will take a quick look at some of the biggest advantages that live chat has to offer:
Reduced the company’s operating costs
In the past, companies have traditionally offered phone support to their customers as a means of reaching out to them. However, this can be incredibly costly, both in terms of toll charges and man hours.
A live chat service costs about the same as a quality email provider. In addition, it is much cheaper than phone support. In fact, studies conducted by Forrester Research show that live chat customer service is 17-30% cheaper than a phone call.
There are many reasons for this, but most importantly, live chat enables your agents or team members to multitask and assist several visitors at the same time. The average live chat agent, with proper training, is able to handle three to five simultaneous chats at any one time.
Chat concurrency, a benefit of live chat, is a way for companies to cut their personnel costs, by allowing small teams of live chat agents to serve the same number of customers as a large team of customer service agents.
Increase in sales
A series of studies has repeatedly shown that live chat increases sales – and companies are reaping the rewards as a result. It has been shown that live chat can drive between 3x and 5x more conversion and deliver as much as 6000% return on investment. The report also mentions that customers that use live chat are three times more likely to make a purchase than those that don’t.
It is clear from these numbers that live chat is a very effective tool to make sales and generate leads. Due to the fact that visitors can instantly access your support staff and your sales team (and vice versa) when using live chat, your team has many more opportunities to turn your visitors into paying clients or customers.
Increased customer loyalty and improved customer service
Consider the eDigital Customer Service Benchmark survey of 2000 consumers as a way of getting a better understanding of how much customers appreciate being able to access live chat. The study found that live chat had the highest satisfaction levels with 73% of customers, as opposed to only 61% for email support and only 44% for traditional phone support.
Benefits of live chat – high satisfaction rate
When you see statistics like these, it’s easy to see why customers return to businesses that offer live chat. When a company makes support easy, seamless, and instantaneous, customers can feel more confident about doing business with them. Oracle conducted a study of its customers, and the results showed 90% of them said the “Live Chat” button gives them confidence that they can get help is they require it.
You can use live chat to give your customers quick answers to questions about your products, solve problems faster, and show them you are ready to assist them at any time. This is a simple, but very effective, way of improving both customer service and loyalty to your company.
Finding out what the customer’s pain points are
Several new business terms have evolved as a result of the Internet Revolution and digital marketing, one of them being “pain points”. In this context, a pain point is a problem that a customer is experiencing that has not been addressed, or a need that has not been met.
The problem with traditional support systems, such as email or phone calls, is that it can sometimes be difficult to identify the pain points of your customers, since the issues may only come into the ears of one specific team or individual.
With live chat, however, administrators and supervisors have full access to all history of all chats, which can be sorted, searched, and filtered, so they can understand what the customers’ pain points are.
So management can easily discover the problems or needs of their customers and come up with ways of addressing and resolving these problems. Using live chat as a tool is one of the most valuable solutions available today.
Faster Resolutions to Problems
Knowledge bases and help articles are excellent ways for companies to offer support to their customers and to solve problems for them. There is a possibility, however, that if you have many of these documents or help articles online, your clients may have a difficult time finding and using them.
With live chat, agents have the option of providing users with links to help and training documents quickly via the chat window. The purpose therefore is to reduce the time spent by agents on troubleshooting and resolution procedures by speaking directly with visitors instead of having them walk through step-by-step procedures.
As a result, even the most difficult of problems to troubleshoot can be solved in an efficient way and on the spot with screen-sharing capabilities.
There is nothing you can do with phone support in this regard. This is a set of features that can be extremely helpful to agents and businesses in helping resolve customer problems in a very efficient fashion.
Live chat software with powerful features
Your customers and agents will love the real-time, personalized, efficient support you will provide them at 1/3 the cost of voice support.
Convenience for the customer
It’s important to keep in mind that at the end of the day, whether or not your business is successful will be determined by the overall quality of your product or service. However, how easy and convenient is it for your customer service to get in touch with you? This might be a close second.
You can provide your visitors with instant access to salespeople and support staff through live chat on your website. Your visitors will be more satisfied with your company as a vendor and a reliable source of valuable knowledge and support if they can easily contact you with any questions or problems that they may have.
Compared to other methods of communication, live chat has clearly been rated as the preferred method of communicating for online shoppers according to a report by Aberdeen Group.
You can find out more about the report by downloading it here. In the report, you’ll discover that live chat makes it easy for your customers to do business with you, which typically leads to them increasing their loyalty and spending. It also results in better reviews being posted on the likes of Amazon, Yelp, and other sites, all of which can help you attract new customers as well.
As a result of another study conducted by Econsultancy, it reveals that customers value being able to use live chat without having to invest a lot of time and attention into doing it. The report states that over half of the customers prefer live chat for multitasking purposes, with another 21% preferring it so they can browse and shop at the same time. With the advancement of technology, people are becoming more accustomed to convenience, and what is convenient is in many ways what drives us as consumers and as individuals.
Advantages and competitiveness of the company
What are the competitive advantages of live chat in terms of customer service?
There is a recent report published by TELUS International that found that many major companies still do not have live chat systems available on their website. The reality is that a recent study of 1,000 websites found that only 9% of the sites use live chat for customer support in real-time to provide them with help in real-time.
The bottom line is that if you opt to install live chat software on your site(s) – and you should – chances are good that you will stand out from your competition in terms of accessibility to a friendly, real-time support representative. It is also going to be easier for you to interact with your website visitors proactively and make more sales, capturing customers before your competitors do.
The number of U.S. online shoppers using live chat has increased from 38% to 58% over the past five years (Forrester), which indicates that every year, more and more companies are implementing this solution in order to meet this growing demand. Additionally, millennials prefer live chat, and as this group of people gains spending power, many companies are scrambling to gain their favor.
For that reason, if you want to fully differentiate your business from that of your competitors – and the opportunity to grow your business as a result – the time to implement live chat on your site is now and not in the future. Check out some of the best practices you can implement when you add live chat to your website.
Expand the market reach of your products and services
In case you are like most business owners, your shop or office is probably not flooded with visitors who drive or fly from great distances to make purchases or request services. Customers and clients like to do business with companies that they have quick and easy access to, as this is what consumers and clients prefer.
There is no doubt that the Internet helps you reach a far wider audience that extends beyond your local area, but just having a website does not necessarily mean your visitors will feel comfortable placing an order there. With the help of a live chat function on your website, even customers who are located thousands of miles away from your physical location can make inquiries or arrange purchases as soon as they get to your site. Among them are international customers, who may not be able to reach your company over the phone because of the high international dialing rates.
With live chat, you are able to expand your market reach in areas you might not have thought were possible. Therefore, in the event you receive an inquiry from a person on the other side of the world, you can be sure that you will greet the person with the same warmth and consideration that you would someone who pays a visit to your office or shop.
Outreach that takes a proactive approach
It cannot be overstated how important it is that your visitors and customers have the ability to reach you instantly through live chat. But what makes live chat the most powerful tool for your business is the proactive outreach capabilities that it provides.
It is true that your website visitors are able to contact you by clicking the chat button on your website at any time, but better live chat systems allow your agents to do the same thing.
Live chat systems in today’s market not only allow agents to receive chat requests, but also to initiate them if they so desire. In addition to sophisticated monitoring and tracking features, live chat platforms can send agents alerts when visitors arrive on their websites and provide valuable information that they can use to initiate conversations.
A chat request from a customer service agent can be sent either manually or automatically based on pre-defined rules. Taking advantage of proactive chat initiations like this can help visitors find the information they need faster and potentially convert more browsers into customers.
Data and Analytics Reports
You have an audit trail of all the emails sent between you and your customers or individuals who make inquiries, and that provides you with a limited level of accountability and the capability to evaluate the performance of your staff.
However, you may find it difficult to review staff performance if you do not have enough time to record all the calls and listen to at least some of the conversations when it comes to phone support.
In addition to the ability to view all kinds of custom reports, you also have the ability to view the chat histories of your agents through quality live chat providers.
You have the opportunity to keep track of a wide range of visitor metrics, such as the number of visitors to your site, the number of chat requests accepted or ignored, and an array of other metrics that will allow you to better implement marketing strategies to draw more traffic to your site.
You can also get valuable insights into the performance of your agents by using live chat analytics. If you combine visitor data with chat history, agent performance reports, wait time reports, and even more, you have a powerful combination that allows you to monitor agent performance, adjust staffing, and adjust training as necessary.