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What could be the best way to deal with unhappy customers?
As one of the common customer frustrations is unable to get real time support.
Having someone to guide when customers are online is a great help that makes them feel happy. The easiest way to kick away the frustration and make them happy is by live chat.
90% of customers rate “immediate response” as very important when they have any kind of sales or support queries.
But most importantly, you should know what is live chat and how it benefits your business.
As we know, customers are the foundation of success for any business, and if customers are not treated right, the business can lose its reason for existence. If you are not able to meet your customer expectations it will impact your brand reputation and customer loyalty.
Let us discuss what is a live chat for website or app and how online chat helps your business to increase conversions and customer satisfaction rates.
What is Live Chat?
Live chat can be defined as the medium that empowers businesses to engage with website visitors & customers for online sales and support via messaging. The chat tool can be used to initiate conversations with first-time visitors, returning customers, and existing users.
The online chat tool is an advanced communication channel & contextual way to drive more sales and retain customers. It allows delivering personalized customer experience by understanding customer pain points and enhancing brand interactions that give a competitive edge.
Businesses can leverage live chat advantages for different verticals like marketing, sales, and customer support. It benefits comprehensively across the customer journey as a whole.
How Does Live Chat Software Works?
It can be classified into two parts – a simple understanding of how to install a chat tool on your website and the second is a contextual understanding of how live chat software works in making your business productive.
Once you choose the best live chat tool, you need to follow the instructions on installing the tool and where to place the widget on the product’s website. It works across any website or mobile by integrating a short snippet code into the preferred pages. Once the chatbox is installed, your customers can view the live chat widget on your website, whereas the agents have access to the dashboard.
You can follow a few steps to install live chat and start chatting with your customers.
- You need to copy the live chat snippet code from the dashboard and paste it to your website’s HTML <head> tags.
- Set the place of your live chat widget.
- Once the chatbox is integrated your visitors can initiate conversations with you.
- In case the support agent is not available, you can leave a message by filling up a form. When the agent is online, you can acknowledge your message.
What makes Live Chat Vital for Website and App?
Live chat for app or website is the most preferred communication channels by the customers due to the convenience of real time support it offers. Providing a platform to communicate with customers in real-time and generating satisfaction levels of 73%, compared to just 61% for email and 44% for phone.
Online chat encourages contextual engagement that boosts customer satisfaction and reduces customer churn. With faster support, it delivers a great customer experience. It helps in engaging inactive or indecisive website visitors proactively based on their behavioral insights.
The key reasons customers prefer to live chat online over other channels are as follows:
- Real time convenience to customers – The role of webchat software is to help connect with the support agent with a negligible wait time as compared to the reactive channels like email and phone support.
- Faster response rate – One of the key reasons why customers leave is due to delay in response. Deliver prompt responses to customer queries in real time via live chat support and deliver a better experience.
- Increase customer satisfaction – When customers are able to contact the right agent at the right time and get the desired solution they are very happy. Live chat helps customer delight by making this happen.
What are the Major Use Cases of Live Chat for Businesses?
Real time engagement is key to boost customer satisfaction. Secure live chat can address this if implemented properly. When you the key use cases of live chat software can help you maximize the overall effectiveness of the tool to boost your business growth. 75% of survey respondents stated they would prefer to live chat.
We can see the reasons why live chat online is one of the most preferred channels.
The key benefits of online chat for businesses:
- Identify customer pain points – With the live chat feature on website, though, admin & supervisors can analyze the chat histories to learn and understand customer pain points. It helps to create effective ways to address and resolve the problems.
- Increase sales conversions – Live chat empowers support agents to speed up in responding to customers queries and positively impact sales. Using live chat software increases sales and higher average order value.
- Reduce support tickets – Online website chat app tool is the fastest way to help customers. It provides instant answers to the sales and support queries in real time and reduces the number of support requests.
- Boost customer loyalty – Online chat instills trust and fuels customer loyalty over time. Moreover, customers who chat prior to purchasing tend to spend more money and are more apt to become loyal customers.
What are the Key Features of Live Chat Online?
Understanding what is live chat and its importance can impact overall business growth. Live chat comes with a wide array of features for your business website. Here are some of the key features:
1. Co-browsing
Co-browsing solution allows real time collaboration with customers. You can interact and control your customer’s browser and visually guide through complex transactions, processes, forms, demos. You can combine co-browsing with live chat and video chat to improve first contact resolution and deliver a truly engaging experience to customers wherever they are. It helps businesses to enhance your team efficiency and reduce customer service costs.
2. Video Chat
Video chat is the best option to provide personalized engagement to your customers in real time. Hence, you can enrich the customer conversations directly on your website and apps in a single click. With video chat, you can deliver a faster solution in the first contact itself by reducing the number of touch points attempted by the customers. You can improve customer satisfaction and build long-lasting relationships with customers
3. Chatbots
Chatbots perfectly complement your live chat to deliver a complete conversational experience to your customers. The combination works perfectly to deliver higher customer satisfaction. Bots can help businesses in two main areas
- Customer support – Bots help in 24×7 engagement of customers by promptly answering the simple queries when your support team is busy or not available. They are easily scalable during peak hours without any additional costs.
- Sales – Bots can automate your sales tasks by pre-qualifying leads and directing them to the sales team for further process in the sales funnel.
4. Customization
Customizing your live chat widget has a great impact on your website visitors and customers. You can customize your widget with:
- Theme – Select a preferred theme to change the look and feel to match with your website branding.
- Agent’s profile – Add human touch to your conversations by customizing your support agent’s profile with the real name or picture.
5. Analytics
Understanding the customer journey helps to gain deep insights that have a great impact on your overall business. Below mentioned are a couple of analytics that can help your business are:
- Visitor analytics – You can learn about your website visitors – where they come from, your most popular pages, and get in-depth insights
- Team analytics – It helps to monitor the agent’s performance and improve your team productivity.
- Chat metrics – You can measure live chat support performance with key metrics like FRT (faster resolution time), ART (average resolution time), FCR (first contact resolution)to deliver a higher level of customer satisfaction.
- Customer satisfaction – You get to know what is the satisfaction level of your customers.
6. Chat Ratings
Ratings help you to improve your live chat customer service by gathering real time feedback that helps to know if the customers are satisfied with the live chat experience. The customer is asked to rate your support team once the conversation ends. You can also collect specific feedback with short surveys post conversation. You can measure the average satisfaction score based on the feedback and check how your agent’s performance can be improved.
7. Advanced Routing
The advanced chat routing feature helps businesses to identify the new chat conversations and direct them to the right department or team. When chats are handled by the right team, the resolution is faster with better satisfaction rates. Chats can be routed based on the team based on three attributes such as time-based, URL-based, and broadcast to all.
8. Triggers
Triggers are the best way to deliver personalized engagement experiences to your website visitors. You can send triggers based on the following attributes to engage them.
- Time based triggers – Pr.oactive chat will be started once the visitor spends a specific time on your website.
- Location based triggers – Chat invitation will be sent to the visitors based on a specific country or location.
- Page URL triggers – Live chat invitations will be sent to the visitors visiting specific website pages.
- Referral URL triggers – Proactive chat is initiated who has visited your website from a specific URL.
9. Integrations
Integration is one of the important aspects of every business as they have to work on multiple tools. Live chat allows easy integration with third-party applications such as CRM or E-commerce tools for seamless data flow. By connecting with your existing CRM software your sales team can manage leads, nurture them, and raise sales conversions.
Live chat for Customer Support
Having great customer service should be the focal point for every business. 80% of consumers say they’re willing to spend more money to have a better customer service experience.
Here are the different ways of how live chat can level up customer service.
- Increase customer engagement – Live chat helps to increase engagement significantly with live engagement tools like co-browsing and video chat. They enable faster solutions and give a strong reason for the customers to retain with your brand.
- Gain customer insights – Live chat allows businesses to collect actionable customer insights to analyze and understand their journey. It enables the team to respond faster by segmenting the target audience.
- Improve team productivity – With live chat software, the important team productivity KPIs metrics such as first response time (FRT), average queue time, numbers of chat answered, etc. can be improved and measure the success of the company.
Live chat for Sales & Lead Generation
Having real time conversations with visitors really does pay off. It acts simply great for capturing and converting visitors.
One of the main reasons to adopt live chat by REVE Chat’s customers is the opportunity to increase sales and conversions. 61% of companies selected lead generation as the main objective for offering live chat support.
Businesses can drastically improve their sales cycle by automating the workflow and connecting leads directly into CRM with an online chat feature.
- Convert website visitors into leads – Live chat is an excellent way to maximize leads and optimize RoI. The chat tools help to acquire more customers by improving response time of the website visitors and generate more sales.
- Shortened sales process – With proactive triggers, send messages to prospects who may need to ask a question about the product or price to make a final purchase decision. Live chat sales build between the company and its audience, helping to generate more leads through customer loyalty.
- Connect with your CRM tool for sales automation – You can connect live chat with your CRM tools like Salesforce, Infusionsoft, etc. It improves the sales process as the team doesn’t have to look for the information required for engaging customers. The sales reps can directly do it from CRM and have everything in one place.
Understanding what is live chat opens avenues for business success
For every business, customer engagement is a critical part of the customer journey. By providing real time assistance with live chat support, when they need it the most is the best way to boost customer satisfaction.
Hence, live chat plays an important role in providing support at the right time and the right way to make quick decisions. Hence, it is one of the most important channels for online businesses and holds paramount importance, thus it should not be ignored!
