Good support on the website is often the key to fostering long-term relationships with your customers. It’s also vital for the long-term success of your enterprise. And when queries on your website get quick responses, it always ensures value to the bottom line.
So, whether in sales, support, or marketing, the focus of your business should always be to ensure prompt replies and save wait time for customers. Together with prompt replies, you can also emphasize giving customers great experiences at every stage of their journey.
To achieve all these goals, you need some website chat features for sure. It can serve you in many ways and help you achieve the kind of speed and efficiency you always want in dealing with customers.
However, you first need to analyze the kind of chat features you need on your website and then take the step of choosing from the available software that meets the criteria. Since not all website chat tools are created equal, it makes sense to compare their features and add to the website the best one from the list.
In this blog, we will discuss various aspects of website chat features and how these features can add value to your business in the true sense.
Why Does Your Website Need Chat Features?
Customers today expect not only great support but also wish for improved experiences when they visit a website. And if your business is really concerned about customers, it would take every feasible step to deliver what is needed. That’s why a website chat can make it easy to offer fast, efficient, and value-driven support to customers.
Reasons are many for your business to need chat features on the website, including –
To achieve speed and efficiency with customer service
Most customers prefer website chat over other forms of support as it’s quick and convenient. And website chat can help you deliver exactly what customers need.
To improve the overall support experience
When customer queries are attended to fast, it often serves two vital purposes – it reduces the wait time and ensures answers at the exact moment customers want. And both have a big role in play in improving the overall support experience for customers.
To make the support team more efficient
A support team is only as efficient and productive as the kind of tools it has at its disposal. With website chat features, your team will find it incredibly easy to deliver quick responses and feel more empowered for sure.
To deliver responses in real-time
Website chat is probably the best tool around for delivering responses in real time. This makes it possible to cater to customer questions the very moment they arise, or as and when needed the most.
To help customers spend more time on your website
Nothing delights customers more than being able to find answers to their queries as and when they need them. Maybe this is the reason why they generally spend more time on websites that have a live chat widget added to them.
Key Statistics about Live Chat Features On Website
Live chat features are something that adds value to both customers as well as businesses. In fact, customers feel that using this form of communication channel gives them the ease of multitasking while waiting for the agent to connect, or while getting help. Obviously, all this makes chat features valuable and we can easily see by the kind of stats they have.
Some of the key live chat stats are –
- Live chat has a conversion rate of 40%. (ICMI.COM)
- 43% of businesses claim that they have a better understanding of their customers within one year of implementing live chat. (Zoho.com)
- More than 6 in ten consumers report that they are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat. (Emarketer)
- Around 80% of customers say that they prefer to use live chat features because of the kind of immediacy it offers. (econsultancy.com)
Benefits of Website Chat Features for Your Business
A lot of your customers would first reach your website before contacting you in person. And when they reach the website, they generally expect to find things quickly and mostly on their own. This is where a live chat tool can come in handy by providing the kind of support and help customers may need at various stages of the journey with your brand.
Some of the major benefits of chat features for your business include –
Save big on customer support cost
Live chat not only makes support instant but also makes it economical. Compared to other forms of offering support such as a phone call, it is more reasonable along with being faster as well. So, a business can expect a considerable amount of money on customer support when it uses live chat features in the right manner.
Gain a competitive edge over others
A good number of businesses don’t take customer support seriously, so they are not too bothered about speed and efficiency with support. And obviously, they avoid adding a live chat to their website for some strange reasons. You however can gain an edge over the competition by doing what they are not – utilizing the full scope of live chat features on the website.
Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty
Compared to other support channels, the use of live chat delivers higher levels of customer satisfaction in the form of prompt and hassle-free support. And when customers are happy and satisfied with the support, they not only stay on the website for longer, and spend more money but also return for more in the future. All this adds up to boosting loyalty with them.
Expand your market reach
Many businesses wrongly assume that the website they have will help them widen their market reach and cater to customers from any part of the world. This is far from the truth as customers are smart these days and they have choices in front of them. However, when you add live chat features on your website, it can ensure more active engagement with customers from any part of the globe. This is how you can expand the market reach of your business.
Give a big boost to sales
Customers are likely to return again and shop with you if your website has a live chat widget feature. This happens because customers expect some form of personalization when they set out to buy something. With live chat, your support agent can talk to them, guide them through various stages of the sales and ensure help at each step of the way. All this can give a big boost to sales.
Top Live Chat Features on Your Website
When customers visit a website, they generally hope to find things there quickly without much delay. And sometimes when they have to go beyond the search, they expect an agent to guide them through the process and make their stay better there. To achieve all this, a website needs live chat installed on it and certain key features as well.
Some of the top features of a website chat tool include –
Co-Browsing
Co-browsing, or collaborative browsing, is a key website chat feature that exists to empower support agents for a smooth collaboration with the customer’s browser. Since the collaboration happens in real-time, this feature allows agents to view the issues on the other hand, and then jointly navigate over the customer’s screen for interactive help.
The value of the co-browsing feature is huge for businesses that take customer engagement seriously. Using this important feature, it becomes easy to offer a beneficial, relevant, and value-driven customer experience at each stage of the journey.
More importantly, the co-browsing feature can prove very useful in resolving a lot of everyday issues that customers often hurl towards agents. It helps your support team know whether a customer is on the right page, seeing the right things there, able to find the buttons there to move ahead, and so on.
Canned Responses
While most businesses talk about the virtues of real-time support, not many go ahead and benefit from something that makes fast replies easy – canned responses. Delivering such kinds of responses is a key aspect of a quality website chat tool as they make support prompt and efficient in the true sense.
After all, canned responses are those pre-scripted messages or answers that a website chat allows sending for various types of FAQs related to sales, support, or marketing. Using this feature, your team can offer quick and consistent responses and therefore engage customers better during an ongoing interaction.
With canned messages, your support team not improves the First Response Time (FRT) but also achieves higher Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT). The agent can feel more empowered and more productive as a business can also use those responses for boosting key team KPIs.
Proactive Chat Invitations
A quality live chat tool gives your support agents the opportunity to reach out and offer help to customers when they are on your website. Such type of help is offered through a proactive chat invitation feature which you can place on custom URLs on the website.
So, for example, if any customer is facing an issue on the FAQ page, or if you think you can help them more in understanding the pricing, you can always place a chat invitation on those pages and ensure proactive help.
It’s also possible to customize proactive chat invitations in tune with your website or your branding. There will also be flexibility to set up those invitations after a certain period to better engage and help the customer.
Video Chat
The website chat software available these days is quite advanced and you can expect tons of useful features aimed at boosting visual and interactive conversations with customers. Video chat is one such feature that helps your business a lot in achieving personalized engagement with customers in real time.
With the video chat feature, your agents can make the value of interactions go a notch up with just a single click. You can not only reduce the number of touch points for customers but can also offer them a quicker resolution in the first contact itself.
Chat Widget Customization
With a website chat, it’s possible to customize the widget and drastically improve its look and feel. You can quickly customize the widget and make it align with your business or support team ethos. By doing that, you can always make a solid impression on your website visitors.
With most website chat software, you can hope to find tons of themes to choose from and then transform the look of the widget. In addition, some quality chat tools also give the feature to customize the support agent’s profile as well and lend a human touch to conversations.
AI Chatbot
What if you could add an AI-powered chatbot to your website chat and make it even more powerful? Yes, some live chat offers this amazing feature where a chatbot can be added to the website chat to ensure a complete conversational experience for customers.
In fact, adding a chatbot to live chat means your support team can always deliver the best hybrid experience – human + bot. While a website chat will take care of the human touch, the chatbot can automate responses and make support a truly 24×7 affair.
When a live chat comes with an added chatbot, its capabilities increase manifold as now it can make the support team available all the time, handle hundreds of customers simultaneously and deliver prompt responses without any extra cost.
Triggers
The real purpose of a website chat is to have plenty of useful features so that agents can feel empowered and interact with customers confidently. And the ability to send triggers to customers is one such key feature of website chat.
With triggers, it becomes quite easy to deliver personalized engagement experiences to website visitors. Your support team can send time-based, location-based, and page URL-based triggers and ensure proactive assistance to customers.
So, with chat triggers, agents will always have the flexibility to send an invite based on the duration a visitor has stayed on the website based on the specific location of the visitor or per the specific page visited by the visitor.
Enhance Website Chat Features with REVE and Grow the Value of Support
Your website chat is only as powerful as the kind of features it’s been blessed with. The more features it has, the more helpful it can become for your business.
At REVE Chat, we’re aware of the huge value that website chat can bring to your business and therefore we help you with our live chat software.
Our software is full of features and it can make your customer communication valuable. You can trust it when it comes to delivering round-the-clock support to your customers.
You can find other helpful engagement tools with our website chat such as co-browsing, video chat, etc, and deliver visually interactive replies to customers.
On top of that, you can always build an AI chatbot with our platform and take a step towards automating various tasks across sales and support.
Make Your Website Chat Feature-Ready with REVE Platform
Delivering quality support becomes a lot easier when you have a quality website chat tool at your disposal. With such a tool, you can not only add value to your support team but also to customers.
With REVE, you get feature-rich and advanced live chat software and propel your support to a new high.
You can start a free trial of our tools and check how they can add value to your support.