Top 7 Live Chat Benefits You Need to Know
What distinguishes a stagnating business from the one that is constantly flourishing in the process of growth is their determination and motivation to excel. Every little improvement that you incorporate in the way you do business, has an impact on the final outcome. Similarly, all businesses regardless of their size strive towards success, which is why a lot of attention needs to be paid to the slightest detail, including live chat.
The success of any business depends on one important factor i.e. customer satisfaction. This is the reason why you should invest all your resources in order to increase satisfaction levels and earn your reputation, and live chat will help you achieve that. Integrating live chat is beneficial for both ends – your customers and your business. Hence, it is a platform that allows you to chat directly with your website visitors.
Live chat is a valuable tool for your business, so let’s look at the few highly praised benefits of live chat.
For centuries companies have used the traditional way of telephone support for customers to get in touch with them. But in this age and time, it can be very costly in terms of toll charges, overseas charges and person-per-hour-costs.
Live chat transcends international and language boundaries. It doesn’t cost more than a quality email provider and is a lot cheaper than phone support. According to a recent research, live chat customer service is 17% cheaper than a phone call. This is primarily because live chat allows your agents to multitask and offer help to several visitors simultaneously. Normally, with adequate training, most live chat agents can handle three or more chats at the same time. This concept is known as chat concurrency, that saves a lot of cost on hiring and training additional agents as it allows few live chat agents to serve the same amount of customers as a larger team of phone support employees.
There are several studies that prove that live chat helps in increasing the overall sales of the business.
One of these studies by the American Marketing Association study shows that live chat can increase conversions by at least 20 percent and that the typical ROI rate from paid live chat software for sales teams is about 300 percent. The same report states that customers who use live chat are three times more likely to make purchases than those who don’t.
Hence, these numbers prove that live chat plays an influential role in generating leads and making sales. Since live chat offers visitors with instant access to your support staff and sales team (and vice versa,) your team has many more opportunities to turn these leads into successful sales.
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Improved Customer Service and Loyalty
Facilitating visitors of your page to receive an answer within seconds instead of spending a few minutes reading several reviews will save them time, which makes live chats efficient and convenient. Although it’s a matter of minutes, it really counts – customers are in a hurry and they want to make a good purchase and do so quickly.
The Customer Service Benchmark survey of 2000 consumers found out that live chat has the highest customer satisfaction levels at 73 percent, as compared to 61 percent for email support and only 44 percent for traditional phone support.
Therefore, these numbers prove that customers return to businesses that offer live chat facility as they feel more confident doing business with companies that make support easy, hassle free and prompt. Live chat support like Chat Outsource helps companies by giving quick answers to customers enquiries about the products/services, solves problems faster and assures them that you are available at all times when they need you. This is a very effective recipe for improving customer service and building long-term customer loyalty.
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Discover customer pain points
The internet revolution and digital marketing, has given birth to several new business terms and one of them is ‘pain points’. Pain point refers to the 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 is difficult to identify your customer’s pain points since they may only be heard or received by one team or an individual.
With live chat, though, administrators and supervisors have access to all chat histories, which can be sorted, searched and filtered to quickly recognize customer pain points. In this way, the management can discover the problems or needs of their customers at ease and can look for ways to solve and address them. This is one of the most significant benefits of live chat.
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Convenience for Customers
All things considered, the main decider of the success of any business depends on the overall quality of your product or service. Nonetheless how convenient and easily accessible your customer service is, maybe a close second.
Live chat facilitates your website visitors with prompt access to support agents. When your visitors can easily contact you with any questions or problems that they may have, they will be more confident in your company as a vendor and a source of valuable knowledge and support.
Even at this time, many big companies still do not use any sort of live chat support on their websites. In fact, a recent study of 1,000 websites found that only 9 percent of websites use live chat to provide real time support to their customers.
This indicates that if you decide on installing a live chat software on your website, there’s a greater chance that you will have an edge over your competitors in terms of welcoming, instant support access. This will also give you an opportunity to engage your website visitors proactively, make more sales and nabbing customers before the competition does.
Although the internet is useful to expand your reach far beyond your local region, just having a website does not necessarily mean visitors will feel comfortable placing orders on it. Hence, if you have a responsive live chat application installed, even customers who are located far away from your physical location can contact you directly and make inquiries or make purchases. This implies to international customers, who may not contact you over the phone due to costly international dialing rates.
Thus, live chat is quite simple to install, so you should have no problems with that, but make sure that you provide adequate training to the support agents and representatives about how to initiate a conversation and how to answer customer queries with utmost care and politeness that they deserve.