4 Great Reasons to Consider Adding Live Chat to Your Website

How your business handles customer service is paramount to your success – and your customers’ if you’re a B2B business. There are so many tools and systems available in the customer service realm to consider when deciding how your team will service customers. One tool to consider is an online live chat function. Here are five reasons you should consider utilizing live chat on your website.

1. Real-Time Convenience to Your Customers and Potential Customers

Having live chat on your website gives customers an alternative to phone calls and emails when they have a question. According to data from LiveChat100 ¹ people are increasingly choosing chat over phone calls. Here’s why:

It’s fast! No waiting for an email reply or being put on hold while the call is directed and redirected to the correct department.
It’s efficient! They get the answer they need. Data shows that 92% of customers using chat report being satisfied with the results of the chat. ²
Knowing that you offer quick chat support can help develop customer loyalty. People are more likely to continue to use services that make it easy for them to get what they need.

2. Cost Efficient

Live chat services are inexpensive and often offer tiers based on your specific needs, allowing you to only pay for the things you’ll use. Chat agents can handle several chats at one time, providing multiple customers with quick, personalized service. That’s not a possibility with phone calls which must be handled one at a time. When live chat is available to your website visitors, phone calls decrease. You can see how the combination of fewer phone calls and the ability to help multiple customers at once both improves your service and lowers support expenses.

3. Great Sales Tool – Increase Conversions and Average Order Values

Live chat services aren’t just for support. They can be a great sales tool when used properly. Perhaps a website visitor proactively contacts a chat agent through your website with a question about a product or service. Not only can the agent answer the question, they should also be recommending additional products or services that would benefit that visitor.

Proactive selling via live chat should be encouraged! You can prompt conversations with visitors on the website. These prompts can happen automatically by turning on settings in your chat console or manually by the agent. The live chat service NetSource uses allows us to see a full list of visitors, how long they’ve been on the site, the city in which they are located, the page they are viewing and how long they’ve been on that page! This information allows us to reach out proactively and ask the visitor if they need help or have questions, initiating a conversation that may lead to a sale.

Something worth noting: make sure your chat system is not obnoxious with proactive chats. It should be easy for a visitor to decline the chat once and not be bothered by it again unless they choose to initiate a chat themselves.

4. Chat Transcripts Offer Data to Improve Customer Service

Chat transcripts can be reviewed by management to ensure that chat agents are providing effective, consistent support to your customers. Examples of both great chats and poor chats can be used in training for your chat agents.

In addition, chats can be helpful insight into any larger issues that need to be resolved. If the same or similar questions repeatedly come through via chat, there is likely something that needs fixed. For example, many chats occur when information cannot be found on the website. In this case, the information needs to be added or placed in a more obvious location so it can be more easily found by visitors, eliminating their need to contact you.

Other Tips about Live Chat

Many options offer a mobile app so you can still stay in touch on the go. If this is a need for your business, it’s something you’ll want to consider up front. The customer facing side of chat MUST be mobile or else you’ll only be providing service to a portion of your visitors.
Not everyone using Live Chat has a department full of people handling support. In companies like ours, the people answering chat are doing many other things as well. In many instances, it’s the sales team of companies who answer chats. Consider your team’s availability when deciding who should handle chats and when. This also helps in determining if you should use the automatic proactive chat options.
This may seem obvious, but make sure your team is trained on how to handle questions and complaints, as well as how to use the tool!
One benefit of chat is the personal connection between the visitor and the agent. Allow your team to have a personality when interacting on chat. No one wants to talk to a robot.

After trying a few different services, we decided on LiveChat (yes, that’s the name) and have been happy with the results. So happy, in fact, that we are a reseller of their tool. Contact us – via chat if you’d like 😉 – for a demo!

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