What if adding a single feature to your website could turbocharge your customer service?
Traditional customer service has come in the form of email and telephone. While those options are still important, it’s equally important that you add a live chat feature to your website.
Live chat provides a better customer service experience while saving you both time and money. On the fence about whether your company needs to use live chat? Keep reading to discover the many different advantages.
Easy Access with Live Chat
Customers love a live chat feature because it provides easy access to your company. When they have a question or concern, they can get the immediate support they need.
Chances are you already offer customer support in the form of email and telephone service. To access those services, customers likely need to spend several minutes looking up the right contact info. With live chat, they can simply hit a button and get the help they need.
Easy access also means customers can take advantage of the live chat feature using their mobile phones. In this way, customers can reach a company no matter where they are or what they’re doing.
Live Chat Gives Better Customer Experience and Retention
One of your chief concerns should always be customer retention. After all, boosting your conversions each month doesn’t matter if more and more existing customers are turning away from the products or services your company offers.
Live chat is one of the best ways to improve customer retention. When customers are worried about something, all they have to do is hit a button and get help. They’ll appreciate how much quicker this process is than waiting on hold forever or having to send an email to a service team who will take hours or even days to respond.
By its very nature, live chat feels much more personalized, and customers are always likelier to stay with personable companies.
Accomplishing Additional Sales with Chat
Some companies hesitate to add live chat because they worry about the cost. It’s worth noting, though, that live chat is affordable to implement. Additionally, it can help boost sales in a big way.
Why is that? Simple: when a customer is on the fence about buying a product or service, a live agent can help convince them to make the purchase. Research has shown that 44% of consumers believe being able to ask questions while they make a purchase is the most important feature you can add to your website.
Getting more sales will help you grow and expand your company. You’ll quickly discover that live chat is a feature that more than pays for itself.
More Choices for More Customers
It’s an open secret that customers love having more choices — not only about products and services but also regarding company communication.
Customer communication preferences may differ across generational lines. Older consumers, for example, prefer to pick up the phone and call someone, seeing this as the most direct way to get answers. Millennials, meanwhile, hate making phone calls and prefer finding different ways to communicate.
By adding live chat but retaining other customer support options like email and telephone, you can help each customer interact with your business in the way that best suits them. This ultimately helps to create greater loyalty among your customers.
Building Trust in Your Brand
Speaking of loyalty, customers are likelier to buy from a company they trust. Live chat helps your agents quickly establish trust with your different customers, eventually building a rapport with them, too.
Live chat helps build trust because customers can get questions answered and resolve complex problems with the click of a button. When customers see that you’re trying to save them time, they are likelier to trust your business.
Additionally, live chat helps agents pick up on the tone a customer is using and adapt to “mirror” communication styles (especially important if you outsource customer service). For example, an older customer may want more formal communication while a younger customer may want something more informal. By mirroring communication styles, your agents can build the rapport necessary for both customer service and sales.
Does Live Chat Provide an Edge over the Competition?
Yes, it can. While live chat is gaining popularity each year, it isn’t yet the norm among different professional websites. That means you can quickly gain an edge over the competition by adding live chat to your company’s website.
We have reviewed many of the biggest benefits that live chat offers to your customers. Just think: when you add live chat, then you can suddenly offer your customers all of these major benefits that the competition cannot. This helps you differentiate your brand while drawing in more customers who want the top-notch customer service you’re now offering.
Better Data and Analytics
Information is essential to providing top customer service. The more your agents know about your customers, the more individualized help they can offer. That’s why so many businesses invest in a good CRM: to help collect customer info and make it available to agents at the click of a button.
Live chat helps collect more of the data you need to improve your customer service effortlessly. For example, you can add a short, pre-chat survey that provides agents with information about the customer and their issues. You can also record chats so that agents can review them later and even add a post-chat survey for customers to fill out.
Over time, this helps you collect invaluable information about your customer, which is especially handy for remote teams. Not only will this make future live chats with these customers smoother, but the analytics data you collect can help you fine-tune both your marketing and your products.
Take Your Customer Service to the Next Level
Now you know what live chat can do for your company and your customers. But do you know who can help you make the most out of each live chat session?
Here at Confie, we specialize in meeting the customer where they are. To discover what we can do for your business, feel free to reach out online or give us a call at 714-252-2500.
