Interact With Your Customers In Real-time With Live Chat

Interact With Your Customers In Real-time With Live Chat

Customer service is the backbone to any business. It plays a key role in both new and retained custom and as a result, gives your business its position in the industry. In fact, 86% say they would spend more money for a better customer experience.

Regardless of where your customer is, there must always be a way for them to reach you quickly and effectively. As more businesses move online, customer expectations grow and as a result, new ways to deliver that high standard of customer service are developed.

Because of this, live chat functionality has now effectively integrated itself into being a key part of the customer service tool kit, with 63% of consumers reporting that they would return to a site if they were able to access a live chat service.

So what makes live chat so important for businesses?

Live Chat and all its benefits:

Of course, as we mention, the most important thing to consider when incorporating live chat, is how it will impact your customer service.

This functionality delivers a heap of convenient benefits for them including:

a) Multi-tasking: Once a live chat is started, customers are still able to complete other actions whilst they wait for responses, there is no need to be glued to the phone – something many deem to be the greatest benefit of the function.

b) Shortened wait times: In the digital age, nobody has time to wait around – being able to deal with an agent without long hold times and call queues, will only enhance the customer service experience.

c) Quick solutions: Emails and continued calls require a lot of back and forth to get issues addressed. Live chat allows quick solution delivery to customers there and then.

d) Questions answered: Many customers require assistance with purchases when shopping, live chat allows them to have their product/service query answered almost instantly, which supports the customer in making the end purchase.

Whilst looking after your customers should remain your top priority, as with any tool, you also want to see your business benefiting from something that you take the time to implement and manage.

Here’s what a live chat functionality can do for you.

What benefit can it deliver to my business?

You don’t need us to tell you that better customer service keeps your customers coming back, which of course keeps your business growing and moving in the right direction. But that is just one area where this functionality can help you.

There are many others:

1) Money Saving - Whilst the key to business growth is to make money, making savings where possible is also crucially important. Whilst email and phone calls remain an effective way to deal with enquiries, they require time and resource to implement, whereas live chat platforms are much more cost and time effective to add to your website. It’s ability to allow users to work on multiple chats at once also reduces time, labour and ultimately money spent by your customer service team.

2) Competitive Edge - Regardless of your industry, it’s bound to be competitive and trying to stay ahead of the game can be difficult in an ever changing environment. Whilst some companies are utilising the functionality of live chat, it’s still new enough that adding it to your own site will help you stand out amongst competitors. 

Most consumers are looking for a positive brand experience and in offering them a new way to talk to you, quickly, effectively and professionally, you are able to deliver that better than your closest competition. Brands without live chat will fall behind, making it crucial to get ahead of the game.

3) Maximising Productivity - The more productive your staff, the more your business can grow. As previously mentioned, calls and emails can often be time consuming and as a result, not as many can be answered or dealt with. Most live chat platforms allow for multi-agents and multi-tasking, allowing your staff to utilise their time effectively across multiple queries. The result is that customers’ questions are answered quicker and your staff can move through them at a more productive rate.

4) Personal Experience - Customers like to speak to real people and can often lose patience if placed in an infinite call queue or go days without a personable response to an email. Whilst automated messaging can be used initially for your live chat, ultimately a member of staff will answer and be able to deliver a customised experience for each individual customer. This approach makes your customers feel like more than just a number and a positive personal experience will likely bring them back to your business.

5) Increased Revenue - Perhaps the most obvious, live chat will allow you to generate more revenue. Studies have shown the importance of assisting customers throughout their journey to purchase and with many often looking for answers. 

A live chat option allows your customers to ask their questions whilst they are browsing your website, and likely in a buying mindset. By being able to quickly and efficiently answer the questions you enable them to stay in it, meaning more sales are completed and more revenue generated overall.

What features are available and how do we get it?

As with anything, there are multiple live chat platforms available, all offering different price ranges and different variants of similar features. Your business needs and specifications will allow you to choose the best one for you, however it should include the following features to deliver more to your customer and maximise your customer service potential:

• Proactive chat window that allows you to directly message backwards and forwards.
  
• Visitor tracking to allow you to see how customers explore your website and where they engage with the chat function. This also allows you to see the number of chats that have been answered and missed to improve how your staff use the tool. 
• Chat routing which allows you to point each chat to the relevant member of staff ensuring no chats are missed and all queries are answered effectively. Chat monitoring is also a great feature here as it allows you to see who is chatting and how long it is taking to get to a solution, again improving processes and productivity throughout.
• Ensure that whichever platform you choose, it has the functionality to adapt to a mobile optimised appearance. With so many people actively browsing the internet on their phone, it must work correctly to maintain customer engagement.
• Offline messaging must be available, particularly if you aren’t offering a 24/7 service. Automated messaging that appears when you aren’t available will instil customer confidence that their enquiry will be answered as soon as someone is back in the office.
  

With so many options available it can be hard to know what to choose and then comes the question as to how to make it appear on the website. For businesses that aren’t techs-savvy, it could seem like a headache.

That’s where we come in!

We’ve benefited first-hand from implementing a live chat functionality on our website and we have also been responsible for the initial set-up of many across our client base who are now reaping the benefits we mention above.

If you feel like this is something you need to take your customer service to the next level, we want to be able to help you get the ball rolling.

We can add the functionality to your site and offer you the relevant training on how to use your chosen platform so that your customer service can be a-class.

Get in touch with us now to discuss your options further.