Customers are preferring the companies which provide better customer service. This trend is now being followed by a lot of companies. This has led to misconceptions about customer service delivery. Though big brands do understand it right, there are a lot of small businesses which fall for these misconceptions.

In this post, we will discuss these customer service myths which you should avoid:

Customer service can be improved by hiring more employees

This is one of the biggest customer service myths. Companies think that hiring more customer service representatives will solve their issues. They need to understand one simple fact:

Quantity is not equal to Quality

You can add as many employees you want but if they don’t understand basics like product details, customer issues, they won’t be able to raise your customer service level.

It is critical to have a strong workforce in your customer service team, but you also need to see if they are doing things right. Some of the things which can help your customer service team are mentioned below

Product training

You can improve their knowledge by providing product training sessions. This will help them gather in-depth knowledge and would be able to provide better customer support.

Communication training

Providing customer service is the task of dealing with people who are not happy with their product or service. Your team members need to say the right thing at the right time, that’s why it becomes essential for you to provide them with communication training. They should be empathetic to customers while dealing with their problems.

Investing more in marketing than customer service is good

It is true that every company needs to spend on marketing activities which will bring in new customers. Organizations spend a lot of money on new customer acquisitions, but you should know that these customers will not be retained if you do not provide them with good customer service.

A good customer service team helps you retain a customer. Retaining a customer is essential for every business in terms of cost.

A study revealed that it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a current one.

Another study revealed increasing customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by 25 to 95 percent.

By going through the above stats, you must have understood that providing good customer service is as important as acquiring new customers.

Therefore, investing more in marketing than customer service will not give you long-term gains.

One formula fits all

There are a lot of brands that follow the template style customer service model. You may find their customer service executives holding a script while providing support to customers.

Templates and formulas are a great way to give helpful guidance to new team members. But if an organization becomes rigid on these parameters, then customer satisfaction level is bound to go down.

Consider a situation, where you’re calling the customer service department of your medical insurer and instead of giving you a comfortable revert, they are sticking to what’s written on the sheet. This won’t help you, because you want some more information which is not written there.

This is why following a template-based formula does not help in customer service. Even if you’re not in the insurance business and consider your current policies to be just fine, you would want to provide a great customer experience. A great customer experience can be provided by providing them with exceptional customer service which is more than “just fine”.

The customer is always right

This is one of the customer service myths which has done most rounds in business circles. It advocates the idea that brands should be able to do everything they can do for the customer.

I’m not against this saying, but if a customer requires you to break one of your policies, then you may have to decline the customer request. You may not say a blunt No to them, but you may use different ways to say no to customers.

Sometimes, a customer may not want you to break one of your policies, but they would want something extra which would be unfair to your other customers and that’s not right. A customer service agent must be able to detect and analyze an unjustified demand from a customer.

By declining your customer request with respect and discussion will help you build a meaningful relationship with customers.

Satisfied customer = Loyal customer

Many organizations tend to fall for this customer service myth. A satisfied customer will come back to you only if he doesn’t get a better experience somewhere else.  A slightly less satisfied customer also lies in the same quadrant.

If you want loyal customers, then exceed your service levels and provide exceptional customer experience. An exceptional customer experience consists of whole customer journey namely discovery, explore, awareness stage, information stage, buying process, delivery, customer service.

You would notice that customer service plays an important role in this journey. A satisfactory customer service will keep the customer experience graph at the same level. But to elevate the graph, you need to exceed the customer expectations by providing them with great service.

This elevated graph is what converts a customer into a loyal customer.

Consider an example of you calling your mobile number operator for some issue regarding your internet speed. One case would be when they fix the issue and you get satisfied. In the second case, they fix the issue and tells you about a new plan which has a less monthly rental and suits your usage. You would feel happier and would refer the company to your friends.

According to a study, business to business companies with referrals have a 70% higher conversion rate, and they report a 69% faster close time on sales.

Less calls = Happy customers

Do you also consider that fewer customer calls equate to more customer happiness?

If yes, then I’m sorry that you’re wrong here.

A low number of customer complaints also means that people do not trust you to solve problems. They may be talking to others like friends, relatives about the bad experience.

A blog post by Amanda Nelson, former manager of content for Salesforce, less than 25% of customers complain when they have an issue, and 70 – 90% don’t bother.

You need to send customer feedback forms to your customers to know the experience levels.  You may encounter a lot of negative feedback but treat this as an opportunity to enhance the product. When customers will see you making improvements based on their feedback, they would start sharing their experience with others.

A famous quote by Bill Gates says that “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Customer service quality depends on agent to agent

Every agent is different, and they may have different qualities but that shouldn’t affect the level of your customer service levels. It is a common customer service myth that some agents are better than the others.

If you want to provide consistent customer service to all your customers, you need to standardize some processes in your organization. These processes can be based on various parameters, some of them are mentioned below:

• Every agent should go through the product training sessions.
• First response time and query resolution time should be standardized.
• Soft skills training should be a must for all agents.

These processes will help you move your customer service from agent centric to process centric.

Conclusion

These customer service myths will help you in improving the quality of customer support. If you think that I missed something, then please let me know in comments.

According to the Accenture report, 48% of customers expect specialized treatment for being a loyal customer. While it is important to understand the needs of the customer, it is also important to understand customer service psychology.  As said goodness goes a long way, focusing on delivering improved customer service acts as a catalyst to the success for any business. 

What is customer service psychology?

What actually makes or breaks a relationship is the psychology of customer service. And the moment when you understand the concept thoroughly is when you are able to boost customer satisfaction rates.

It is very important to understand what motivates customers to ensure successful customer service interaction. For example – A customer who reaches out to you with a complaint or problem, their motivation is probably to get the problem fixed. They expect an attentive ear who will acknowledge their right to feel bad about the problem. 

Customers expect to be valued, listened, cared about their problem and want assurance that the same won’t be repeated in the future. Customer psychology can be analyzed and understood based on their behavior and emotions that will help you to serve them better.

The essence of customer service psychology

Great customer service is directly related to customer satisfaction. And you can never improve satisfaction unless your team has customer service smart goals to follow. Here are some reasons that will prove that the customer was and will always remain the king.

• Customer loyalty – Today’s customers have multiple options. If they are not satisfied with your service they can risk you to your competitors. It’s your service that customers will remember and be associated with your brand. It is the indicator of how likely they will repurchase your product in the future.
• Brand advocacy – You get to know your customer’s preferences, interests. Connecting with them with personal conversations strengthens your relationship. When you have satisfied customers, you get the best brand advocates as they share their success stories and experiences.
• Growing new opportunities – While listening to your customers closely you come to know what they actually want or expect from you. This can help to retain them with your business and develop new business opportunities.

To cut it short, customer service motivation is vital for the sound health of your business. Strategic planning and sincere efforts can help you to deliver top notch customer service.

Main elements to understand the psychology of customer service

One highly effective way to improve customer service is through the application of customer psychology. By understanding the psychology of customer service, you can have a big impact on satisfaction levels. This can allow your brand to better understand customers and provide a higher level of intuitive support.

Let us discuss the vital facets of customer service psychology.

1. Emotional intelligence is crucial in customer service

According to Psychology Today, emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.  

Emotional intelligence focuses on the most important part of our human minds i.e. emotions. Emotions help us to develop and motivate to take action in different circumstances. But then how it is applied in customer service?

Let’s find out.

Effective customer communication is one of the main elements of customer service. And without emotions, communication can’t be meaningful between the agent and the customer. Emotions are essential to understand what actually your customer is feeling. 

So if you want to polish your communication strategy with customers you need to work on improving your emotional intelligence.

Five main components of emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman

• Self-awareness -The ability to recognize and understand personal moods and emotions and drives, as well as their effect on others. The hallmarks of self-awareness are self-confidence, realistic self-assessment, and a self-deprecating sense of humor. 
• Self-regulation – It is the ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods, and the propensity to suspend judgment and to think before acting. The hallmarks here are trustworthiness & integrity; comfort with ambiguity; and openness to change.
• Internal motivation – A passion to work for internal reasons that go beyond money and status.  And the hallmarks are strong drive to achieve, optimism even in the face of failure, and organizational commitment.
• Empathy – The ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people. A skill in treating people according to their emotional reactions. The hallmarks include expertise in building and retaining talent, cross-cultural sensitivity, and service to clients and customers. 
• Social skills – Proficiency in managing relationships and building networks, and an ability to find common ground and build rapport. The hallmarks of social skills include effectiveness in leading change, persuasiveness, and expertise building and leading teams.

2. Branding makes customers stay loyal 

Loyalty is a virtue. But it has to be earned to truly mean something. That’s true in life in general, but it also goes for marketing. Customers won’t just stay loyal to brands because they’re there—you have to earn the loyalty of the people you sell to.

The customers who are brand loyal are simply loyal to your business. 

Brand loyalty is simply when customers become committed to one brand over its competition and make consistent repeat purchases over time. There are actually many reasons why a consumer can become loyal to one brand over its competition. 

Some common reasons that can be helpful to examine are:

• Convenience – Customers might be lazy to seek out your competitors as it is easier that way once they have chosen you first. 
• Status – Brands that provide tips on ‘being yourself” make customers feel cool and they buy it. When brands provide such a pleasant experience, customers will stick around.
• Trust – When customers know your brand well and are convinced to depend on it, they are likely to be associated with you.
• Reputation – If a customer believes in what a brand stands for or they like the brand’s attitude they’re likely to want to buy from that brand. 
• Excitement – A brand that is inspiring or that continuously does interesting things to grab attention can engender loyalty from customers. 
• Camaraderie – When buying from a brand makes you feel like a part of something bigger than yourself, you’re more likely to want to continue buying from them.

The more effective is the branding strategy of the business and execution, the more customers will be found in the upper echelons of the pyramid.

For example, Apple has a very strong loyal customer base and this is for several reasons. 

• The company holds an effective brand strategy which allows it to have a passion for its products and customer experience.
• They guarantee the high quality of every product they have to offer.
• They continuously innovate in customer tech and they are willing to satisfy customer aspirations. 

Through customer’s brand loyalty, Apple has reaped several benefits like increased rate of retention, increased referral rate, increased share of wallet as well as reduced marketing costs.

3. Proactive customer service reduces the frustration

Real time assistance is the top priority in customer service. Most of the customers leave frustrated if they fail to receive instant support. Live chat software bridges the gap and boosts customer satisfaction with proactive support.

InContact study drew an inference that customers are satisfied and positive with proactive customer service.

How live chat help businesses to understand customer service needs.

• Live chat helps the agent to figure out that the customers are having some doubts or queries and asks for assistance before they make any support request with personalized triggers. 
• You can also proactively engage with customers with visual engagement tools like video chat & voice chat and co-browsing solutions, to make the conversation effective and offer faster solutions. 
• You can automatically route your chats request to the right agent or department for an expert solution and reduce the wait time.

With live chat software, you gain valuable insights about customers’ profiles and trigger the right message at the right time to deliver customers the best customer service experience.

4.  Deliver faster resolution with live tools

There are times customers encounter serious technical issues that are difficult to explain in chat. The real time identification of the issue helps to know the complexity of the issue. Faster and effective resolution becomes imperative in such scenarios. 

We can’t ignore the fact that 34% of U.S. respondents listed the inability to connect with a live person for support and automated IVR annoys customers and has a negative impact on service experience. The live customer engagement tools ensure faster resolution in the first touchpoint.

Live engagement tools improve customer experience by following ways

• Faster real time resolution – Live tools such as video chat and co-browsing help to identify the issue faster by collecting the information and provide faster solutions to customers. 
• Reduces the number of touchpoints – With live tools, the problem can be diagnosed appropriately in the first contact the issue by direct chatting and collaborating with the customer browser. Thus, reduces the multiple touchpoints made by the customer.
• Personalized communication – Face to face communication allows friendly personalized conversations that build trust and credibility in customers. Better experience across the customer journey – With the live tools, you guide your customers across entire their entire lifecycle starting from awareness, acquisition, engagement, and retention. It enables customers to make quick decisions that improve their satisfaction.
• Improve satisfaction – When customer’s issues are resolved in the first interaction that too, faster, it raises customer satisfaction level.

5. Always active support with chatbots 

Customer support criteria are different for different businesses. For those who need to deliver a response in less than 30 seconds, chatbots are the best option. You can automate the customer service process to deliver real time support when your support team is not available. 

You can train bot with FAQs and business information to engage customers, thus reducing the number of support requests. The bots also collect customer information and prequalify the leads who are transferred to the sales team for further nurturing. 

How chatbots help to engage customers and boost customer satisfaction

• Immediate response – No one likes to wait and so do customers. Chatbots manages to resolve customers’ queries instantly with automated responses.
• 24×7 availability – Bots are always active to engage customers 24×7 by providing personalized support outside of regular office hours.
• Personalization –  Bots offer customers a personalized experience, targeting them with the right messaging and helping them make better buying decisions.

Conversational bots are widely used in FinTech to deliver excellent customer service as chatbots can resolve a basic issue or query instantly. Chatbots deliver faster response, handle multiple requests simultaneously and they are easily scalable. 

Bank of America introduced an AI-driven virtual financial assistant called Erica. The bot Erica efficiently handled the customer service queries in various ways such as:

• Sending notifications to customers
• Providing balance information
• Sharing money-saving tips
• Providing credit report updates
• Facilitating bill payments 

Erica has surpassed 6,000,000 users and has serviced over 35,000,000 customer service requests.

6. Follow omnichannel support strategy

How about streamlining all your customer conversations in one place?

Customers choose to engage with businesses across various channels, including the web, social media, email, mobile devices, kiosks, online chat, and by visiting physical locations (storefronts or service centers).

Creating consistency among every channel improves the customer experience as well as the brand image. 

With omnichannel support, you can unify all your customer conversations in one place and helps in a better understanding of your customer journey. The valuable insights help in engaging them across their buying journey across all touchpoints.

The businesses that follow omnichannel strategy retain an average of 89% of customers compared with 33% for those with weak omnichannel strategies.

Why mapping the customer journey is important?

• It allows you to understand your customer behavior throughout their journey
• You can identify the areas where your customers may need your assistance
• You can offer proactive actions across the behavior stages.
• It enables to develop a process to deliver customer support via the right channel (live chat, live tools, chatbot).
• You can acquire customer feedback and improve your support process to deliver excellent support.

7. Keep customer communication transparent

“Transparency is the new normal.” – Forbes

There is a close connection between transparent business communication and customer retaining with your business. 

A Zdnet survey made on 1000 US customers on their transparency beliefs, expectations and desires it was found out that consumers’ expectations of transparency grow daily. Almost nine out of 10 Americans believe transparency from businesses is more important than ever before.

Best practices:

• Propel authentic information about your product or services to avoid future confusion among customers.
• Try not to make fake commitments and set customer expectations that will break their trust and loyalty.
• Know your brand offers and discounts prior to offering to customers to maintain brand efficiency.

8. Use positive language with the right vocabulary

Generally, customers switch brands because they are put off by untrained or rude support professionals. McKinsey – 70% of the customer’s journey is dictated by how the customer feels they are being treated.  

So, it is very important to choose the right words before you speak to your customers. The customers can get a bad impression with certain words or phrases used by the customer support agents.

Always make your customers feel comfortable, valued, and appreciated. Be knowledgeable of and understand the relevant policy and procedures. Always listen to what they say without interrupting them in between. 

Protips:

• Make the conversations one-on-one basis, that will give a special feeling to the customer.
• Use the first name to address the customers while talking to them.
• Identify the nature of the problem and understand customer needs.
• Send personalized greetings to set a personal tone to your conversation.

Never waste time in general questions – jump directly to the right solution for the customer makes the process personal as well as efficient.

9. Practice prompt social listening to connect with your customers

Gartner study found that businesses that do not respond to social media messages face up to a 15% increase in customer churn.

Today, social media has become the most preferred platform by customers for instant assistance. Insights Guide says Facebook reported that more than 1 billion messages are sent from customers to businesses, ever year.

Social listening is monitoring the social conversations about your brand via brand mentions, specific keywords or phrases, and comments. By actively listening to the conversations, you can educate and build relationships with prospects as well as customers.

Key benefits of social listening

• Responding promptly to customer service needs on social media encourages customers to spend between 20% to 40% more with the company.
• Active social listening reduces operational costs. Handling customer requests via social media channels are up to 12 times cheaper than by phone.
• Gain a competitive advantage and make your business stand out of the box.

With social media listening, you understand customer service psychology that helps to boost customer satisfaction and reduce customer support costs.

Final thoughts

The bottom line is – “Never take your customers for granted”. Rather you should not miss out on a single chance to make them feel special and offer gratitude for choosing your business. As we all know learning is an ongoing process – one of the most effective ways for businesses is to analyze and define customer service needs by putting in their shoes in different scenarios. Thus, you can establish a healthy relationship with your customers. 

This plugin is a great tool for businesses that wish to support customers while they browse their websites. It allows integration of the Messenger experience directly into the website. With this integration, both you and your customers can interact with each other anytime with the same Messenger-like personalized, rich-media experience.  

More importantly, the Messenger Chat plugin enables a single experience for customers and helps you continue the conversation even after they have left your webpage. Thanks to this wonderful plugin, you don’t even need to worry about customer analytics for tracking purposes as you can use the Messenger conversation for the same. 

In this blog post, we will discuss the Facebook Messenger customer chat plugin, how to integrate it with your WordPress website, and how to use it to achieve a robust omnichannel customer support strategy. 

Benefits of REVE Chat Facebook Messenger Chat Plugin for WordPress Website

Facebook Messenger app is a huge platform when it comes to getting prospects, driving conversions, and ensuring quick support to customers. The kind of user base it has is something no business can afford to ignore. For that reason, its very own chat plugin holds immense value for businesses.  

Using the Facebook Messenger Chat Plugin can bring a variety of benefits to your business. 

• Integrate Messenger experience into your website – The chat plugin enables your business to bring the Messenger experience into your website and leverage a popular social network for a whole range of benefits. 
• Deliver better social support – Your business can easily engage customers and deliver improved social support when it uses the Chat plugin. 
• Easily adopt an omnichannel approach – It’s now possible to engage, communicate and interact with your customers across Facebook comments, messenger and website chat in one place. 
• Convert Facebook chats into leads – By using the Messenger Chat Plugin, your can get more customers with Facebook Messenger and comments. Plus, there will a great possibility of converting Facebook chats into leads and sales. 

How to Add Facebook Messenger Chat Plugin to Your WordPress Website    

It takes only a few clicks to add the Facebook Customer Chat Plugin to your WordPress website. You don’t even need much technical knowledge to install the plugin. Facebook has made it really easy to add Messenger Chat plugin WordPress to any website in seconds.  

‍You can follow these simple steps to add the Messenger Plugin to your WordPress website. 

Step 1: Install the Facebook SDK on Your Website

In the first step, you need to copy and paste the chat plugin’s JavaScript into the HTML code of your website. You can insert it directly after the opening tag of the web page you want the chatbot plugin to show up. This will help install the Facebook SDK on your website.  

Step 2: ‍ Add Your Domain on the Facebook Page Settings 

After installing the Facebook SDK on your website, you need to add your domain by going to the page setting option. There, you need to add your domain to the whitelist.   ‍

Step 3: Paste the Code 

In the next step, you will have to paste the code and add the attribute of choice in order to add the chat plugin to your website.   

These steps are enough to add the Facebook Messenger chat plugin in your website. Now your website is connected to the plugin and you can start the conversation with users.     

Tips to Use Messenger Chat Plugin WordPress  

Engaged customers often bring value. And when it comes to engagement, personalization rules the roost. With a huge platform like Facebook, there is always a great possibility of getting tons of leads and converting them into sales. This is where the Messenger Chat Plugin can help. 

Your business can add a new dimension to customer engagement & customer communication by using Facebook Messenger Chat Plugin. 

1. Engage Customers with Instant & Real-time Communication 

Customers always expect instant replies and quick resolution to their problems. And if you’re not able to provide that, it can prove a big impediment to your customer engagement initiative. 

Worse still, 89% of consumers have switched to competitors following a poor customer experience. So, you need to be aware of how you engage with users and provide them quick service. 

With the Messenger chat plugin, you can interact with your website visitors in real-time and provide instant solutions. More importantly, you can engage users better as you will already know a lot about them, courtesy of their Facebook profiles.   

You can also easily solve their problems with your products service etc. and add value to their experience. 

2. Keep the Conversations Continued Across Devices & Platforms 

Using the Messenger chat plugin gives your business the flexibility to keep the conversations ongoing across various device platforms and websites. 

For example, if a conversation begins via your business Facebook page, you can easily keep it going via your website or vice versa. This flexibility is not only helpful for businesses alone but can add great value to customers as well. 

Now customers will find it effortless to take the conversation from their social media pages to your website and vice versa. They can seamlessly continue to move back and forth devices, channels, or platforms and maintain the flow of communication with your business.

3. Provide Personalized Support 

When you use the Facebook Messenger chat plugin, it helps website customers reach you with a click. You can then engage and delight them with personalized service and advice. 

At the same time, you can offer quick answers to commonly asked questions and enhance their experience with your brand. 

In addition, your business will have persistent conversion threads where all the interactions are inherently centralized. Having access to such threads ensures you always keep a track of customers’ original requests or complaints. 

And when you know a customer issue inside out, it always helps to offer great personalized support.  

4. Re-target Customers Later with Facebook Broadcast or Ads 

Not all customer communication follows the path your business may desire. A lot of them would abandon the chat midway for one reason or another. And when chats are left midway, it somewhat becomes difficult to reach out to the customer in question.

This type of problem is quite common with other chat systems as they won’t help in receiving a user’s information in case the chat is abandoned mid-way. However, no such problem happens when you use the Facebook Messenger customer chat plugin. 

With this plugin, potential customers will always be in your Messenger and you can re-target them any time in the future with Facebook ads or broadcasts.  

5. Automate Your FAQs

You can deliver great customer experiences only when your service agents are motivated. And if they are overworked and stressed, it might compromise the quality of customer service to a great extent. 

Automation is one of the best ways to reduce agents’ workload and keep them motivated for longer. Plus, it’s now a necessity for businesses given how ver 80% of business leaders plan to speed up work process automation in near future.  

By using an AI-powered chatbot for the most common questions, you can not only deliver instant replies but can also keep reps more productive. 

The bot will deliver answers to their queries in a few seconds and that too without requiring the intervention of humans. This will lessen the pressure on your customer support team. 

6. Make Social Customer Service More Conversational    

Social platforms are increasingly becoming a favorite way for customers to reach out to businesses for queries and information. Plus, social conversations are fun and quick and this also makes these platforms fit for support.

However, not all businesses take their social support strategy seriously. Most make the mistake of replying late to queries or ignoring complaints about there. Well, this kind of strategy is not helpful in a time when customer service on social channels is supposed to remain more conversational. 

With the Facebook Messenger chat plugin, it’s easy to start conversations on the website and stay in touch over Facebook, making social customer service more conversational.   

Facebook Messenger Live Chat Integration with REVE Chat

Facebook is a popular messaging channel preferred by customers a lot. For a business, it’s important to fully leverage FB’s messages or comments by having all the conversations under a single platform. This will help your business have one place to deliver a unified customer experience on the Facebook platform.

Integrating Facebook Messenger Live Chat Integration with REVE Chat can assist your business in a variety of ways.   

• It will be easy to assign Facebook comments & messages to the right team members to track their progress, therefore improving engagement and making customers feel valued.
• Your business can track all the conversations across Facebook comments and messenger under one platform.  
• Thanks to the integration, you can measure your team performance and customer KPIs with advanced reporting. 
• When you use the Facebook Messenger chat plugin WordPress, it would be easy to gain better insights into how the conversations are managed by your team.

How to Integrate Facebook Messenger Chat Plugin with REVE Chat?

You can follow some simple steps and quickly integrate the Messenger chat plugin with REVE Chat.

The steps are: 

1. Start the process by going to the Integrations menu on your dashboard. Now select the Social Media Channels option and then click on the Facebook option. 

2. A click on “Connect your Facebook page” will redirect you to your Facebook account. You can log in by using the registered email or phone number. 

3. Right after connecting successfully, there will appear two ways to manage your Facebook messages and comments – (I) Managing Direct Messages and (II) Managing Comments Separately. 

From the options, enable the checkbox to meet your business needs. You can choose either Messenger, Comments, or both of them.

When you enable the Messenger check box, it will help you check the direct messages from the REVE Chat dashboard and respond to them. 

And when you enable the Comment check box, it will help your team get a real-time view of the comments left by the customers.          

Final Thoughts on the Great Value of the Facebook Messenger Chat Plugin 

Social customer service is set to grow in scale and significance and your business needs to keep pace with this changing trend. You should stay prepared to efficiently cater to Facebook customers if you want to grow the business. 

With REVE Chat, you can start a free trial of top-notch customer service tools and also benefit from its integration options with leading social networks including Facebook. You can also integrate the Messenger Chat plugin WordPress to your website in a quick time.  

So, the time is right to think of integrating the Messenger chat plugin with your website and taking the right step towards adding value to your customer service strategy.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who came to your website and left without doing any action to people who came to your website and performed some action. This action can be visiting other pages or filling up a form or something else as well.

In simpler words, it is the percentage of all people who enters and exits on the same page, without any clicks to other pages on your site.

High bounce rate means that your website is not interesting or of less value. This is one of the metric which you want to reduce whereas you would want to increase other metrics like conversion rate.

So, I’ve listed 7 proven methods which would help you on how to reduce bounce rate of your website:

1. Be Careful with Pop-Ups          

Pop-ups do not have a very positive impression on the users. Instead, people tend to get annoyed by them. In fact according to a study, 70% of Americans say they get annoyed by irrelevant pop-up ads.

Once a user is annoyed, he will leave your site immediately making your bounce rate on the higher side and giving you no business or time. Pop-ups have been a debate topic between website owners and marketers from a long time since they are also very good in increasing the subscriber list.

Source

If pop-ups are designed properly keeping it in synchronization with the brand theme, then they can be very useful.

Generally, popups are awful for user experience and should be avoided.

2. Add Live Chat to your Website

With the changing times, the customer wants their query to be resolved fast, or else they switch. Visitors may get stuck at someplace which you didn’t consider while designing or they get confused then they’ll leave if their query does not get resolved.

A live chat widget might help you in this case. You can answer all the queries of the customer keeping them engaged to your website and hence providing a better user experience. According to a study, 73% of customers were satisfied with their live chat experience, surpassing all other channels. By comparison, email and phone customer satisfaction rated just 61% and 44% satisfaction, respectively.

You can use live chat widget on you product pages or check out pages to increase the conversion rate of your website.

3. Focus on your Website Navigation

People do not like to get lost, and when they do not find clear navigation on your website they tend to bounce off. A visitor who has come to your website and consumed the content for which they came, now do not find a proper link to your homepage will move back. So, how would you engage visitors?

Make your navigation clear by giving links to your homepage, about page, and other important pages. Try to use the copy simple and easy to read.

4. Don’t Ignore Call To Action

According to a study by Small Biz Trends, around 70% of small business websites belonging to the B2B domain lack a clear call-to-action on the home page.

This is one of the major reasons for having a high bounce rate and low conversion rate.

You work hard to write awesome content and work harder to bring people to your website but when they come and do not find a proper CTA, all your work goes in vein. If you want to increase your website conversion rate, then you need to make your Call- To – Action clear and prominent for the visitors.

One of the methods for a clear CTA is to make the background color of CTA different from all other colors on the webpage. Suppose your webpage has white background then something in orange will flash out without annoying the customer.

A Danish ecommerce website which is car accessories business has increased their conversions by up to 17.18% just by making changes in their CTA.

5. Improve your Page Speed

It is a no brainier that consumers hate to wait. They do not want to wait for your webpage to load for more than 3 seconds.

According to a study, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. You do not want your website to be in that category.

As you can also notice that every second is important when it comes to online shopping, a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

If your landing page will load slowly then more people tend to bounce off. Moreover, page load time also effects your SERP rankings. Google does not support and rank websites that are slow to load, which results in a high bounce rate.

You can test your website speed with Pingdom Website Speed test, an ideal page load time would be 2 seconds or less.

6. Add Internal Links

This is one of the easiest methods to decrease bounce rate. When you add internal links in your content, people tend to visit other pages as well and hence engagement increases. This helps in lowering the bounce rate of your website.

Though this technique works beautifully but it can backfire if you try to include links in every sentence hence reducing the overall value of internal linking. It also hampers the reading experience and hence increases the bounce rate. A poor example of internal linking is below

Source

7. Invest in Mobile Friendly Design

People are consuming maximum content on mobile. Smartphones have made everything accessible and hence many people would be using your website on mobile. It brings me to a very important question:

Is your website mobile responsive?

If your answer No, then you need to act fast and make mobile friendly. As almost 95% of your customers are on mobile, so your site must be optimized for them.

A holiday portal Alpharooms have managed to reduced their bounce rate on mobile to 35% and double their conversion by making their website mobile friendly.

It’s not only users but Google also is supporting mobile friendly feature in the websites. In fact, mobile-friendliness is an important ranking signal by Google. It means that if your website is not mobile-friendly then you won’t rank well on Google search rankings either.

You can check if your website is mobile-friendly here Google’s mobile friendly test tool.

Conclusion

You’ve seen the methods which have helped many people reduce the bounce rate of your website but they won’t be able to help if you don’t post interesting content. Please do not hesitate to share any method which I may have missed but has worked for you to reduce the bounce rate of your website.

The e-commerce Industry is growing at such a rate that consumers in the United States will spend up to $632 billion online in 2021, according to a study by Business Insider.

One of the major eCommerce platforms, Shopify boasts to have powered more than 500,000 eCommerce stores worldwide whereas another platform named PrestaShop powers around 250,000 eCommerce stores. So you can understand the amount of competition out there.

And at the same time potential is also huge, according to research 67% of Millennials and 56% of Gen Xers prefer to shop on online rather than in-store.

Now that you’ve set up a store, you can’t expect sales to come in automatically. You need to make some efforts in order to increase online sales to your platform.

Since the growth of every business depends on the customer experience, you can also check these eCommerce Metrics which can help you measure customer experience.

So, I’m going to share some tips which will help you increase your eCommerce sales:

1. Don’t Ignore mCommerce

According to a study of more than 500 global retailers, 51.3% of traffic comes from mobile devices, and this traffic accounts for 36.8% of sales.

This metric alone can make you understand the importance of moving to m-Commerce and improving e-commerce customer service. Having a mobile responsive website is good but providing a fully functional and mobile website with a better user experience will take your store to the next level.

Start testing your website user experience on mobile for various tasks such as product search, CTA, mobile checkout, payment processing, etc. It affects your conversion rates from mobile at a very large scale. You need to start optimizing your mobile website if you want to stay in the game. 

Plus, no matter which platform you use, you may use a chatbot for Shopify or WooCommere, or for any other e-commerce channel and drive the rate of conversational commerce.  

2. Provide Live Chat Assistance

There are times when website visitors do not convert because of some doubts or questions which went unanswered. This has led to lost customers since most of them would not connect with you over the call or email for clarification.

What could have stopped them is a solution to their questions. You can do it with a live chat solution on your website. In fact, according to a report, 49% of respondents prefer using live chat for online shopping questions. Live Chat has been there for a while for businesses to provide instant assistance for website visitors and to provide support.

It increases customer satisfaction rate, and conversion rates and lowers the wait time for customer resolution. It also increases the chances of customers coming back to you as 63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat as opposed to one that doesn’t. Some other eCommerce tools can also help in boosting sales. 

3. Optimize Conversion Funnel

You know people are coming to your website but somehow not converting. They may be losing at a particular step. You need to find out the page from where people are exiting. It could be a cart, payment page, etc.

You can track this using Google Analytics conversion tracking. All you need to do is create conversion funnels in your Google Analytics platform and then start tracking it.

One of the conversion killers is the Shipping costs. 28% of shoppers will abandon their shopping cart if presented with unexpected shipping costs.

You’ll be able to find out the page from where you are losing people. You can do further research of finding the root cause of these leaks.

4. Use Social Media

Social Media has been really important in recent times to drive sales to e-commerce stores. People tend to rely on social media more and are more likely to engage and purchase with you.

If you’re still thinking about the role of social media in your sales then this study will clear your doubt. It says 61% of organizations engaged in social selling report a positive impact on revenue growth.

Customers are quick to share their views and tag other people from their social circle while they are on your social media page.

One of the ways to engage people on social media is by organizing simple contests or hosting giveaways in for free merchandise in return for asking for a few details. You can also ask people to tag their friends in the comments or share their images using your product. It creates a buzz among them and their friends which helps in your branding and hence increases your reach.

5. Offer Personalized Deals

Everyone loves personal attention. And when dealing with customers, you need to make them feel special by offering them exclusivity. According to the Infosys survey, 67% of those who have experienced personalization highly prefer personalized coupons.

You need not give only discounts but you can personalize by offering other services like “Free Shipping! It’s your 5^th purchase with us”

This small gesture will go a long way and make the customers feel special. But keep in mind the CLV of the customer while offering discounts. You can also offer some discounts like “Additional 5% Off since it’s your Birthday Week”.

Always remember that these small gestures make a big impact on Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Satisfaction Score.

6. Reviews Are Important

You know people tend to believe what other customers are saying more than your advertisement. So, when they do not find any reviews on the product page, the chances of them converting becomes very low.

A review shows an honest opinion about the product and that you’re transparent about the quality. While it is also important to keep a tab on what’s being said and answer the queries there and then.

A study indicates that nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.

Apart from reviews on the product detail page, you can use social reviews for your help as well. Reviews on your social media pages are proof of coming from real people hence increasing the trust of people on your website.

Since social media has lately been used as a customer service channel. It shows a great opportunity to increase your conversion rates.

Conclusion

Now you know these secret tips which can help you increase your eCommerce sales. These tips have helped many businesses and have been time-tested.

If you know of some more tactics which can work and are worth sharing, please share them in the comments section below.

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