Why Choose Live Chat – Here Are Some Compelling Reasons

Have you ever been to a bank and found one counter with the display, “May I help you?”

How comforting was that for you in the early days of banking? They help you with everything related to all types of transactions.

The same goes for railway and bus ticket bookings.

Now, all of these have moved digital and you are left with very little human interaction.

Let us say you go to a shopping site looking to buy a pair of shoes. You are stuck with the size chart because they give references for UK-size and US-size.

You don’t know which size to pick up, though they have a 100% no-frills return policy. Despite that, you want the shoes on time, and you want them to fit you.

What if they provide you with a live chat facility where you can get your queries sorted and confidently go ahead with your purchase?

I am sure you’d absolutely love it.

This is precisely what live chat offers. You don’t have to take the pain of calling their customer service to reach an agent, explain your challenge, and get a resolution.

This takes away a lot of time, but with a live agent, it is instantaneous, and you get your responses immediately.

I will give you another example.

You run a B2B website, and you get a lot of visitors. However, they are not getting converted into customers.

You don’t know what they are looking for and how to direct them to what they are looking for easily. You have a lot of metrics and analytics, but you are stuck in the conversions.

You implement heatmaps and tweak your call-to-actions to get your visitors to engage with you.

You get incremental results, and you keep improvising.

Imagine having a live chat feature on your website.

Wouldn’t your customers be willing to ask what they are looking for directly? Then, your agent can direct them to the appropriate page on the website.

I am sure the conversion would be much better.

What Is the Impact of Having a Live Chat?

Here is some research-backed data to champion the case of implementing live chats: 

• According to Forrester Research, “Live Chat leads to a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour and a 40% increase in conversion rate.” Another Forrester study reveals that a live chat session is about 20% – 50% cheaper than a phone call.
• A case study with Virgin Airlines showed a conversion rate that was 3.5 times higher than that of people who had emailed the company. Chatters had a 15% higher average order value compared to those who didn’t use the chat.
• Live chat is the consumer’s sweetheart, scoring customer satisfaction rates of over 90%.
• According to Econsultancy, 79% of consumers prefer live chat as a contact channel because they get immediate answers.
• Lime CRM study found that 65% of the respondents prefer speaking with chatbots if it helps them get a fast answer.

Here Are Ten Benefits of Live Chat in Your Business

1. Improve Conversions

Let us assume you go to a retail store. You’d expect people to be available to greet and assist you. If they say self-service in a physical store, the likelihood of you becoming a paying customer or remaining as one will become slim.

Likewise in the digital environment, you need to be available to answer questions and assist customers with their purchase.

With live chat, you can do them in real time.

2. Customer Convenience

• What is the balance in my account?
• What are the last five transactions in my account?
• I want to block my card as I lost my wallet
• I want to request for my bank statement
• What is the status of my order?
• When will my refund be processed?
• What are your return policies?
• Want to know more about your product specifications
• Want to understand the shipping costs
• Want to compare products
• How do I complain about a feature of your product?

These and many more questions would be on your mind. The majority of these questions are transactional, and a live chat session would be the most convenient way to resolve them.

Besides, it is multimedia-friendly. You can have features like file sharing and media support that empower customers to choose any format. For instance, if you want to come on video and chat about something, it allows. You don’t want to type the long account number, and you want to share the photo of your membership card – it is possible.

It gives so much convenience.

3. Save Money

A live chat session saves money for your organization through various means.

An agent on the phone can handle only one customer at any given point in time. On the other hand, an agent on chat can handle multiple customer queries simultaneously. This saves direct costs for your organization.

Let us assume that I have a query on the size of the shirt that I am buying, and a live chat would help me resolve it. This would avoid costs associated with product returns.

As live chat takes away all uncertainty related to your purchase, you reduce the cart abandonment rates considerably.

4. Exploit the Power of Data

Live chat makes it easier to collect the name, location, email, and phone number of your customers.

You can make use of this data to re-engage with your customers after the chat session has ended. You may want to extend an offer to them.

It can be easily integrated as a part of your customer experience platform. You can upload all the information that you collect on chat to your CRM and run a cadence program that helps you with conversions and sales.

5. Live Chat to Chatbots

Look at all the transactional queries that your customers ask. Almost 90% of them can be addressed by automated chatbots.

As an organization, you should opt for a bot and direct those customers with complex queries to the live agents.

This reduces the headache of maintaining and managing chats 24×7.

6. Agents Feel Upbeat

Typically, a customer service representative’s job is considered a dead-end one. Often, they find it stressful and demanding.

Figure out a way to tell your customer service reps to man one more channel. They would immediately refuse.

That would not be the case with live chat. Live chats might just get them to be more upbeat about customer service.

Live chat is a more personal, more fun, and informal communication channel.

7. Metrics to Help You Succeed

Live chat solutions help you track metrics like the agent’s response time, first contact resolution, chat volume, and customer satisfaction scores.

It also keeps track of additional sales opportunities created, sales numbers, and conversions.

8. Simplest Competitive Advantage

No customer left behind might just well be considered cliched or cheesy, but it is true with live chat.

No customer leaves your website because they are not able to find what they are looking for, as help is only a click away.

With live chat, you are able to give the best possible customer experience. You may not be able to offer everything a customer asks for, but you are available to tell them that you don’t provide.

That, in my mind, is a very positive experience, and this can be your simplest competitive advantage.

With live chat, you’d be able to get all the business that your competition is leaving behind on the table.

9. Always Available

Have you ever thought of 24×7 support?

With live chat, it is possible. You don’t have to man your chat with live agents. For instance, the first response will be from a chatbot with the option for the customer to switch to a live agent.

Most queries can be handled by the chatbots, and the complex ones get forwarded to live agents.

The live agents can even be agents on other channels who can double up to handle the chat.

Besides, creating knowledge bases and self-service tools will help the customers resolve most queries themselves.

10. Proactive Reach Outs

With your ability to identify the customers visiting your website, your live chat can pop up with fancy offers related to what they searched on your website or spoke about on the live chat during their earlier visit.

This would allow you to convert a number of your website visitors into paying customers.

Some Housekeeping Basics

When implementing live chat, here are a few things that you should keep in mind:

1. Train your agents thoroughly on your products and services so they can answer customer queries easily.
2. Ensure that you have an easy way for customers to reach a live agent at any time during the interaction.
3. Keep updating the knowledge base with the most common issues that customers face.
4. Communication is key. So, dejargonize them and make it easy for your customers to understand
5. Have options for the agents to access all your customer information systems to have a single view of your customers.

The best part about live chat is it is easy to implement and manage. The advantages live chat offers far outweigh the investment and the effort that goes into implementing it.

The benefits of live chat are endless, and it is high time that every business that is concerned about customer experience should implement it.

Let us chat up.