One of the most common reasons for customer frustration not able to get real time support. Having someone to guide when customers are online is a great help that makes them feel happy. The easiest way to kick away the frustration and make them happy is by live chat.
Hubspot research says 90% of customers rate “immediate response” as very important when they have any kind of sales or support queries.
But most importantly, you should know what is live chat and how it benefits your business. As we know customers are the foundation of success for any business, and if customers are not treated right, the business can lose its reason for existence. If you are not able to meet your customer expectations it will impact your brand reputation and customer loyalty.
Let us discuss how online chat helps your business to increase conversions and customer satisfaction rates.
What is live chat?
Live chat is defined as a SaaS based messaging solution to provide real time assistance to your website visitors and customers for online sales and support. Live chat is one of the most preferred communication channels for online businesses to deliver real time engagement.
Online chat encourages contextual engagement to drive more sales, boost customer satisfaction and retain customers. Emarketer found that 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat. With faster support, it delivers great customer experience. It helps in engaging inactive or indecisive website visitors proactively based on their behavioral insights.
How live chat works?
Live chat is a widget that can be added to your website. It works across any website or mobile by integrating a snippet into the preferred pages. You just have to follow few simple installation steps to start chatting with your customers.
- You need to copy the live chat snippet code from the dashboard and paste it to your website’s HTML <head> tags.
- Set the place of your live chat widget.
- Once the live chat software is integrated your visitors can initiate conversations with you.
- In case the support agent is not available, you can leave a message by filling up a form. When the agent is online can acknowledge your message.
What are the key benefits of live chat?
Real time engagement is key to boost customer satisfaction. Live chat can address this if implemented properly. Knowing the key benefits of live chat software can help you maximize the overall effectiveness of the tool to boost your business growth. 75% of survey respondents stated they would prefer to live chat.
We can see the reasons why live chat is one of the most preferred channels.
The key benefits of online chat for businesses:
- Faster response rate – One of the key reasons why customers leave is due to delay in response. Live chat is the best way to deliver prompt responses to customer queries in real time and improve customer satisfaction.
- Increase sales conversions – Live chat empowers support agents to speed up in responding to customers queries and positively impact sales. Using live chat software increases sales and higher average order value.
- Reduce support tickets – Live chat is the fastest way to help customers. It provides instant answers to the sales and support queries in real time and reduces the number of support requests raised by customers.
- Boost customer loyalty – Live chat instills trust and fuels customer loyalty over time. Moreover, customers who chat prior to purchasing tend to spend more money and are more apt to become loyal customers.
What are the key features of live chat?
Live chat software comes with a wide array of features for your website. Here are some of the key features of a live chat support software:
1. Customization
The live chat tool comes equipped with a powerful customization feature. Customizing your live chat widget has a great impact on your website visitors and customers. You can customize your chat widget with:
- Theme – You can select a preferred theme to change the look and feel, place the chat widget to match with your website branding.
- Agent’s profile – Add human touch to your conversations by customizing your support agent’s profile with the real name or picture.
2. Advanced Routing
Advanced chat routing feature helps businesses to identify the new chat conversations and direct them to the right department or team. When chats are handled by the right team, the resolution is faster with better satisfaction rates. Chats can be routed based on the team based on three attributes such as time-based, URL based, and broadcast to all.
3. Chat Ratings
Chat ratings help you to improve your customer service by gathering feedback that helps to know if the customers are satisfied with the live chat experience. The customer is asked to rate your support team once the conversation ends. You can also collect specific feedback with short surveys post conversation. You can measure the average satisfaction score based on the feedback and check how your agent’s performance can be improved.
4. Analytics
Live chat analytics helps to gain deep insights into your overall business. A couple of live chat analytics that can help your business are:
- Visitor analytics – You can learn about your website visitors – where they come from, your most popular pages, and get in-depth insights
- Team analytics – You can monitor the agent’s performance and improve your team productivity.
- Chat metrics – You can measure live chat performance with key metrics like FRT, average resolution time, FCR to deliver a higher level of customer satisfaction.
- Customer satisfaction – You get to know what is the satisfaction level of your customers.
5. Triggers
Live chat triggers are the best way to deliver personalized engagement experiences to your website visitors. You can send triggers based on the following attributes to engage them.
- Time based triggers – Proactive chat will be started once the visitor spends a specific time on your website.
- Location based triggers – Chat invitation will be sent to the visitors based on a specific country or location.
- Page URL triggers – Live chat invitation will be sent to the visitors visiting specific website pages.
- Referral URL triggers – Proactive chat is initiated who has visited your website from a specific URL.
6. Co-browsing
Co-browsing solution allows real time collaboration with customers. You can interact and control your customer’s browser and visually guide through complex transactions, processes, forms, demos. You can combine co-browsing with live chat and video chat to improve first contact resolution and deliver a truly engaging experience to customers wherever they are. It helps businesses to enhance your team efficiency and reduce customer service costs.
7. Video Chat
Video chat is the best option to provide personalized engagement to your customers in real time. You can enrich your customer conversations directly on your website and apps in a single click. With video chat, you can deliver a faster solution in the first contact itself by reducing the number of touchpoints attempted by the customers. You can improve customer satisfaction and build long-lasting relationships with customers
8. Integrations
Integrate your live chat software easily with your third party applications such as CRM or E-commerce tools. By connecting with your existing CRM software to manage leads, nurture them and to offer great customer support.
9. Chatbots
Chatbots perfectly complement your live chat to deliver a complete conversational experience to your customers. The combination works perfectly to deliver higher customer satisfaction. Bots can help businesses in two main areas
- Customer support – Bots help in 24×7 engagement of customers by promptly answering the simple queries when your support team is busy or not available. They are easily scalable during peak hours without any additional costs.
- Sales – Bots can automate your sales tasks by pre-qualifying leads and directing them to the sales team for further process in the sales funnel.
What is live chat: for customer support
Having great customer service should be the focal point for every business. 80% of consumers say they’re willing to spend more money to have a better customer service experience.
Here are the different ways of how live chat can level up customer service
- Increase customer engagement – Live chat helps to increase engagement significantly with the help of live engagement tools such as co-browsing and video chat. They help to provide faster resolutions and give a strong reason for your customers to retain your brand.
- Gain customer insights – Live chat help businesses to collect actionable customer insights to analyze and understand the customer journey. It enables the team to respond faster by segmenting the target audience.
- Improve team productivity – With live chat software, the important team productivity KPIs metrics such as first response time (FRT), average queue time, numbers of chat answered, etc. can be improved and measure the success of the company.
What is live chat: for sales & lead generation
Having real time conversations with visitors really does pay off. It acts simply great for capturing and converting visitors
One of the main reasons to adopt live chat by REVE Chat’s customers is the opportunity to increase sales and conversions. 61% of companies selected lead generation as the main objective for offering live chat support.
With live chat, businesses can drastically improve their sales cycle by automating the workflow and connecting leads directly into CRM.
- Convert website visitors into leads – Live chat is an excellent way to maximize leads and optimize ROI. It helps to acquire more customers and of course generate more sales. The chat tool improves the response time of the website visitors and improves the chances of sales.
- Shortened sales process – Through proactive triggers send messages to prospects who may need to ask a question about your product or price to make a decision for final purchase. Live chat sales build between the company and its audience, helping to generate more leads through customer loyalty.
- Connect with your CRM tool for sales automation – You can connect your live chat software with your CRM tools such as Salesforce, Infusionsoft, etc. It helps to improve the sales process as the team doesn’t have to look for the information required for engaging customers. The sales reps can directly do it from CRM and have everything in one place.
How live chat works along with AI chatbots?
Live chat and chatbot make a powerful combination to automate conversations and deliver faster answers. You can optimize your team performance by bots handling the simple queries and complex conversations by the live support agents.
Bots can engage customers 24x7and works hand in hand with the support agents by collecting customer details before transferring the sales or support queries to the right agent for humanized support.
Chatbots boost the customer experience by following ways:
- Provide 24×7 support – AI chatbots help you to engage your customers 24×7 by answering their simple queries. Thus, reducing the number of support requests that improve your team performance.
- Automate customer service – Automating customer service with the best chatbots will provide long-term benefits to your business. They can be used as the first contact to handle FAQs. Bots can be easily scaled during peak hours and provide personalized support.
- Automate your sales leads – You can automate your sales cycle with chatbots. They can provide in-depth business information to your sales prospects, ask them pre-qualifying questions and direct them to the next level of your sales funnel.
Understanding what is live chat is the key to success for online businesses
For every business, customer engagement is a critical part of the customer journey. By providing real time assistance when they need the most is the best way to boost customer satisfaction.
Hence live chat plays an important role in providing support in the right time and the right way to make quick decisions. Hence, it is one of the most important channels for online businesses and holds paramount importance, thus it should not be ignored!
