At AlphaMind Studios, one of our favorite and most recommended features to add to website design for a wide variety of clients is live chat. If you’ve ever browsed a business website and had a question, you may have felt the pain of having to click around and search, visit another site for an answer, or spend time trying to get a solution only to leave frustrated with a lack of one.
Live chat can help you improve customer satisfaction, while freeing up staff. It can increase your revenue through more conversions, and improve sentiment for your business. Here are five reasons why we recommend adding a live chat option to your website.
1. Give Customers Immediate Help
Consumers today expect immediate gratification from brands, and chat and instant messaging are king. A survey by [24]7.ai found 28.9% of customers prefer interacting with retailers via online chat or messaging apps, which is higher than phone and email. Data from Forrester Research shows 55% of American online adults will abandon a purchase if they don’t get a quick answer to a question.
Live chat keeps your brand in front of customers so they can get help more quickly. You can decrease the likelihood a customer will abandon your site to get better service from a competitor, by keeping them engaged via live chat.
Saving chat data enables you to pick up the conversation with a returning customer, too, so you can save time on having to play catch-up during future conversations.
2. Upsell Through a Personal Connection
For ecommerce businesses, live chat provides the opportunity for a human connection over the web. Customers can get more personalized recommendations on the products and services that are best for them, which leads to more upsell opportunities. A chat conversation can elevate the ability to upsell beyond the impact a popup window suggestion could make.
A study by the American Marketing Association found live chat can boost B2B conversions by at least 20%, and the typical return on investment rate for live chat for sales teams is about 300%. Plus, customers who use live chat are three times more likely to buy. You can not only increase your sales for each customer with live chat, but also make consumers feel like your business cares about them, which increases sentiment for your brand.
3. Save Money on Resources
In 2016, WP Engine, which provides managed WordPress hosting, announced that it would start offering 24/7 live chat for technical support. It began featuring live chat during limited hours in 2013, and found that 90 percent of all questions and issues were able to be solved in single chat sessions.
Compare that to other customer support channels like phone service, which might require that a user is transferred to multiple employees over a single session. Those who are managing live chats can talk with several people at a time, which decreases wait times for customers and frees up more customer support agents. Customer service becomes more efficient while customer satisfaction increases.
4. Deliver Better Service
As mentioned, live chat options are in high demand for customers. More than 90% of consumers want to have the option to chat with businesses, TechCrunch reports. Your business has the opportunity to provide the type of service your potential customers want by offering live chat when your competitors don’t.
Some ways you can use live chat to enhance the service you offer include:
- Provide a live chat option for onboarding when a customer signs up for a web service
- Add a live chat popup to 404 pages, so you can get customers the info they were searching for
- Add content related to a page a customer is viewing, like a link to a blog post, in a chat popup window, which enables customers to learn more about the topic and then talk with a representative if they want
Using live chat to solve customer service issues enables your team to discover common customer pain points and proactively combat them. If you’re getting the same types of questions via live chat, you can create a piece of content that educates customers. Common queries can be used on FAQ pages, in blog posts and in explainer videos. You can gain insights into what products or services customers are searching for online when they come to chat with you, and spotlight those more in your digital marketing efforts to give leads and customers more of what they want.
5. Capture Leads
Live chat is a powerful way to capture more qualified leads for your business. Think about all the information you can glean from a live chat conversation:
- Name and email address, which you can gather before the chat so you can follow up after
- Pain points of the customer, and how they were resolved
- Feedback for your business about its services or products
- Best next steps for future interactions with the lead
A 2017 lead response survey of 433 B2B companies found only 7% of companies responded to sales inquiries within 5 minutes. The companies with the 10 fastest response times all had live chat on their websites. Once you have a conversation with a lead on chat, you can add them to the marketing funnel so they get highly targeted content and are more likely to convert to a sale.
Get Live Chat for Your Website
Live chat is a service that can deliver a powerful return on investment regarding customer service, sales, consumer data and more. If you’re building a new website or want to add chat to an existing one, contact us for website design information tailored specifically for your brand.
