Live chat has been around (in various formats) for approx. 50 years!
As we move towards 2021, having a live chat agent online is becoming more important than even in streamlining how businesses communicate with customers in real-time.
Live chat is a valuable tool for any business website.
In this article, we will touch on a few of the key reasons why you should add live chat to your landing page or website, and the immediate and tangible benefits that come from live chat software.
Reduced Expenses
Let’s cut straight to the chase: Offering customer support by phone can be costly to set-up and resource.
Phone agents are limited to only handling one phone call at a time. This is inefficient and when there is an influx of calls it results in a poor customer experience and higher customer churn.
An experienced Live Chat agent can comfortably handle 2 to 3 concurrent chats (depending on complexity).
This allows you to virtually double or triple your capacity for customer support and/or sales support.
Live chat is instant, it offers a quick answer to your potential customers’ questions and helps them find the information they need without needing to call and wait on the phone for a response.
Insight: 53% of customers say that they would prefer to engage with a live chat agent before calling a company for support. (Source: Harris Research)
A live chat agent can easily and instantly provide answers and support, and helps ensure that current and future customers have their needs met in real-time.
Adding a live chat agent can expand your support hours
If you don’t already have a live chat agent available on your website… you should!
Make sure you’re set up to respond!
Another great benefit of live chat is that you can easily extend your support hours beyond the traditional 9-5 office hours.
For most websites, around 45-55% of website traffic is visiting your site outside of normal business hours..
Business need to evolve to meet the needs of customers who expect instant answers.
One of the many benefits of live chat is that you can log in to the chat software from anywhere and at any time.
Live Chat allows you to extend support beyond office hours.
Ideally, you should have a live chat agent online 24/7.
Not sure where to start? We offer fully managed or co-managed solutions to ensure you always have support agents online.
Increased Leads and Increase Sales
It’s well documented that live chat will increase website conversion rates and helps deliver more leads.
Our own clients report an average 30-50% increase in incremental leads after adding live chat monitoring to their website!
An increase in leads translates to a higher return on investment from their marketing investment.
According to this article by Time Magazine, a study of over 2 Billion website visits found that:
55% of website views spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page!
Business is always going to be competitive, and it’s important to make your site sticky and engage as many website visitors as possible.
This helps ensure you capture as many leads as possible.
An experienced live chat agent can engage a website visitor in a conversation and help uncover their reason for visiting your website, and from there you can:
a) Capture a lead.
b) Book an appointment.
C) Assist the website visitor to purchase online, or;
d) Assist the browser to navigate your website and find the information they are looking for.
Improved Customer Service and Loyalty
Imagine that you’ve just walked into a physical store or showroom.
You’re looking for a team member to help to find the right solution..
You have some questions that you need to be answered before you are ready to make a purchase..
What would you do if you couldn’t find any staff members to help you?
How long would you wait before giving up and go search for another company that’s more responsive?
If you don’t have live chat on your website, this is what’s happening right now, and you can instantly fix it!
Live software instantly expands your customer service channels.
Your team is immediately available when a website visitor needs assistance.
Website visitors prefer to use live chat agent if available.
The “Customer Service Benchmark” survey of 2000 consumers found that live chat has the highest customer satisfaction levels compared to other channels:
The survey reported the satisfaction levels to be:
73% for live chat.
61% for email.
44% for phone support.
Discover Customer Pain Points
Pain points refer to a customers’ problem that has not been resolved or that has not been answered.
With traditional customer support systems, such as phone calls or email support, it’s difficult to identify your customer’s pain points since they will often only be heard or received by one team or an individual.
With live chat, you can access the chat histories, which can be sorted, searched and filtered to quickly recognise customer pain points.
Addressing the problems or needs of customers is a significant benefit of live chat.
Reputation Management
Live chat is an amazing tool for helping with reputation management!
Often when a customer is unsatisfied or upset, they will come back and visit the vendors’ website to look for available customer support channels.
By having live chat agents online, you allow people to reach out and chat in real-time to discuss their needs.
This allows the live chat agent the opportunity to resolve the issue quickly, and helps the customer move forward.
Alternatively, the live chat agent can collect the information about the complaint, and set the correct expectations on how it will be addressed and responded to.
As an example, our live chat team are trained to handle reputation on behalf of our clients.
Our team can quickly put a customer at ease by following a simple two step process:
First: We allow the customer to explain the problem they are facing.
Second: We set the correct expectations on when your team will respond to address the issue.
Using this method, we have successfully helped clients to significantly reduce the number of negative reviews online.
Live Chat is a fantastic channel for reputation management as it’s easy and responsive 24/7.
In Summary
There are many great reasons to add live chat to your website, whether it’s for customer support, lead generation, online bookings, or a combination of reasons.
Live Chat immediately makes your business more accessible and responsive to our fast-paced 24/7 world.
Live Chat Monitoring has packages starting from $149 per month (less than 20 cents per hour!) for fully managed live chat services.
We also offer self-managed and co-managed solutions (which allows your team to handle chat during business hours, and our team will take over after-hours and on weekends).
Let our team manage your live chat so that you can focus on managing and growing your business!