Live chat has become the leading contact source for companies around the world. Consumers have spoken and they prefer to do that speaking via chat with a representative rather than make a phone call. From quick and easy questions about products to billing concerns, consumers are taking advantage of live chats at all hours of the day, whenever it’s convenient for them.
There are a lot of reasons to incorporate live chat and interaction on your company’s website, but at Online Potential, we see the same three reasons popping up time and time again for our Orlando-based clients.
Reasons to Implement Live Chat & Interaction
- Improve customer experience
- Reduce expenses
- Increase sales
Improve Customer Experience
If you’ve ever waited on hold, you know it can be a frustrating experience. There are so many variables, and any one factor can set a customer off and turn a customer service situation into a fiasco. Annoying hold music, disconnections, draining cell phone batteries, hearing troubles, multiple transfers, and a hundred other reasons can keep a consumer from reaching out to a company. All of these troubles, and more, can be resolved through a live chat feature.
When a customer connects to live chat, there may be a waiting period. However, the consumer can easily keep browsing or perform other tasks while a representative becomes free. This allows the consumer to keep busy without a phone to their ear so they are less likely to become frustrated by a 5-minute wait time.
Accents and regional pronunciations can be troubling for a lot of consumers and employees. Thick accents may be difficult for your callers to understand clearly which can cause frustration on both ends. Keep your consumer calm and give your employees confidence to resolve the issue by taking out this delicate variable. Live chats are also ideal for consumers who are hard of hearing or deaf. There’s no long delay that you would normally have with a TTY service, which can improve employee satisfaction and effectiveness.
Reduce Expenses
Intricate phone systems can become costly to install and maintain, and then of course you must train your employees on using the new phone system. There’s also the inconvenience of hearing your co-workers’ calls which can cause confusion and make it more difficult to concentrate on the issues at hand. Instead of spending money on noise-cancelling cubicles that tower over everyone’s heads, switch to live chat and keep the cacophony at bay.
Live chat is extremely easy to install on your website and use on any computer. This means all of your employees can be available for customer service assistance instead of just one or two of your best phone users. By having more available representatives, you can cut down on a consumer’s wait time but also spread the workload out among the employees, which can increase productivity.
Chatting is pretty easy, so you’ll find that your employees can handle more than one chat at a time, which is something you would never want to do with live calls. A chat box retains all the important information during the chat, including the customer’s name, so there’s less room for mistakes or giving out information to the wrong customer. And just as consumers can multi-task while live chatting, so too can your employees, which can reduce costs and improve productivity.
Increase Sales
Too often we hear from clients that phone interaction with consumers is nearly always a negative interaction. When your consumers aren’t happy, they aren’t going to spend money and they’re more likely to share their negative experience. But imagine how happy a consumer might be if they have a quick question and your live chat representative can answer that question in less than 3 minutes. One good customer service experience can increase the likelihood of buying from or recommending the company in the future.
A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, and discussed in August 2014, shows that consumers who have better previous experiences with a business spend 140% more than customers who have the worst experiences with a business.
At Online Potential, we also see businesses who lose sales opportunities because the buying process is complicated, consumers can’t find the answers they desire, or a site function is not performing optimally. With live chat, you can walk your consumers through a sale, find out if a feature is not working, ensure that promotions are applied accurately, and answer any questions or concerns that may arise.
Live Chat Tips from Online Potential
Now that you see how important live chat integration can be, make sure you’re staffing your chats when your consumers need you the most. Regular business hours may not be practical, and there could be certain periods of the day when you need a fuller staff to support the increase in chat requests. We recommend training your team in handling chats while also embracing their personalities. It’s important to be polite and professional, but it should be obvious that consumers are chatting with humans, not robots or automated chats.
Online Potential is here to help you determine whether a live chat feature can help your website be more successful. We want to see your business grow in Orlando by using the latest and most effective tools at your disposal.
