Why Live Chat Is Important for Your Business?
Live chat support is one of the most dynamic ways to communicate with your customers. With live chat, you can turn every interaction with visitors to your website into a better experience and build longer relationships.
Live chat is the best way to go beyond your customer’s expectations and improve customer experience when communicating with them. Companies that deliver good live chat support see an increase in customer satisfaction and higher sales.
What is live chat?
Live chat is an online communication tool just like any other chat messaging tool such as Facebook messenger or Google chat. Two people can send private text messages to each other. The messages can include links, images and documents.
There are hundreds of live chat software you can install on your website. Visitors to your website can engage with your company by asking questions with an agent who could be sitting anywhere in the world.
Live chat is well suited to providing customer support. You can solve customer’s problems faster and improve customer satisfaction. Your customers receive a response much faster than they would through email or support tickets that can take hours or even days. Quick response and interactive nature of live chat make it an ideal channel for customer support.
Increases Customer Satisfaction:
Customers prefer using live chat over other ways of getting support. They get answers to their questions immediately, without leaving their computer. They don’t need to remember the phone number to call or wait for hours to get a response to their questions.
Support agents can share links to FAQs, instructional videos, documents and other resources though live chat. Customers can also share their screens with agents to help them better understand the issues. These features make live chat the best support tool and improve customer satisfaction.
Helps Discover Customer Issues:
Live chat is a digital channel where everything is recorded. Since the information is in text format, it’s easy to analyze to identify issues causing problems for customers. It’s much harder to analyze call recordings in case of telephone support. Even email support data is much more difficult to organize and analyze compared to chat transcripts.
With live chat, administrators have access to all chat histories, which can be filtered and searched to quickly recognize customer problems. In this way, the management can discover the problems of their customers and can look for ways to solve them. This is one of the most significant benefits of live chat support.
Convenience for Customers:
The main success of any business depends on the overall quality of product or service. Quality and accessibility of customer support is a close second.
Live chat support is easy to find and use for website visitors. They just click the live chat icon on the screen and start chatting with a support agent. When customers can easily contact your support team with their questions or problems, they are more likely to use and recommend your product or service.
Live chat support is one of the most engaging, efficient ways to delight your customers.
Increases Sales:
Live chat support is a very good sales channel. When customers contact an agent with a problem, the agent can build rapport with the customer while solving the problem. If the agent sees an opportunity, he can suggest additional features or products to the customer. Since chat is an interactive channel, the agent can easily demonstrate the new products / share links for the customers to learn more.
A well-trained live chat support agent can deliver over 100% return on investment.
Reduces Expenses:
Live chat support costs much less than phone support while providing the same benefit of immediacy and building relationship with the customer. The phone support channel needs expensive hardware and software. Phone agents are also more expensive compared to live chat support agents. There is also the cost of telephone calls every time a customer contacts support team.
According to a research, live chat customer support service is 17% cheaper than a phone call. Live chat support allows your agents to do multitask and offer help to multiple visitors simultaneously. Normally, with adequate training, live chat agents can handle two or more chats at the same time. 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.