The Benefits of Live Chat

The world of online marketing is dominated by a focus on the channels for acquisition; SEO, PPC, Social media, display, etc. Yet we often forget about the second half of the conversion funnel. Once a visitor has reached your site you need to work to turn that visitor into a customer. After all, you have paid to bring that visitor, make sure that your marketing investments are being protected.
With the rising popularity of live chat tools, site owners both large and small, can use live chat to engage with site visitors. Here are the tips you need to implement a successful solution on your site.

Benefits Of Live Chat For Customer Service and Satisfaction

Whether you are currently selling goods online or not, the satisfaction of your website visitors is most likely a subject of your concern. For many of us, measuring and understanding if visitors are happy with our service is an important part of our job.
When you implement live chat onto your website you add the possibility for a human operator to interact with your visitors, to check how they are doing, if they need any help or just spread out some friendly messages. All this will enhance an experience that they will remember later on.

Conversion Rate

If you ask a webshop owner what is their biggest goal, you will likely get to the answer “to increase conversion rate”. Once again, it all comes down to making sure your website visitors don’t just wander around but actually buy something from you.
By chatting with your website visitors you can guide each person into the check out moment and recover what might have been a lost sale. The more support you provide, the bigger the chances of making the call (especially if they happen to be in the moments of greater need such as when they are looking for payment methods or shipping options).
Keep in mind that one of the greatest advantages of selling over the chat is the accessibility gain to reach customers without media switch.

Get to know your audience

One of the main premises of a solid marketing strategy is the ability to know one’s market, segment and target. However, when it comes to online dynamics assessing this information might be a little bit more difficult.
Website analytics tools give us a lot of information about our website visitors and their behavior. Nowadays, you can extract almost everything from demographics to interests and past consumer behavior.
However, there are a number of things that you can only understand when you meet or engage personally your customers. Things like why are they looking for your product, who will be using it, the way they like to be treated or other prospects to understand their lifetime value.

Ease of Management

When you are chatting with your customers, everything is written down. This simple state makes it a lot easier for later review and follow up. After integrating live chat with your CRM software, you can monitor all customer interactions, at any time without any complication.
Despite live chat can be used for many different purposes, from providing support, to selling or collecting leads, its software enables you to track all different types of interactions through a single panel.

Low-Cost Channel

If there are two things everyone is worried about are time and money. These two walk hand-in-hand as the more productive you are the less time and money you are wasting. This is why we can consider live chat as a low-cost solution for support.
When compared to other support channels, live chat proves itself as more effective, fast which therefore reduces your support pressure and associated costs. Simultaneously, one can do so many other different things while chatting that you might not even need a dedicated person (of course it all comes down to your business size and structure).

The Drawbacks

Unfortunately, not everything is perfect and even live chat software has its downturns.
The biggest struggle some businesses face when implementing this channel is the need for human support. Of course there is an associated cost to have someone answering behind the chat. Not only this but also that person would need training and monitoring which requires extra effort from your side.
To understand whether its worth to hire a dedicated person to deal with your live chat support you can consider your average revenue and consider an increase between 10% and 20%. Then compare it to the cost of hiring an operator.
If hiring another person is not an optimal solution for your business then you might consider the following set of solutions:
Offline Messages: For any website there is the possibility that visitors can drop by their messages even when your support operators are not able to be online. Together with these offline messages they can even attach a screenshot and their user information (such as browser, device and location) will be recorded.
Mobile Clients: If you are always on-the-go you ought to know live chat can follow you. Easily, you are able to install live chat into a mobile client and answer your website visitors in your way to that special dinner.
Blend out the chat button: Some believe, and we agree, that chats must be answered immediately providing instant support. If for some reason you are not able to chat you have the possibility to hide the chat button so that your visitors don’t feel misled.
Hire Third-party to do the Support: Maybe not the cheapest solution but definitely worth the thought, especially if you want to take things seriously. Hiring a dedicated team to provide your chat support is a great idea for bigger business who have the resources to let someone take over their high-quality support service.