One of the most common frustrations customers face is being unable to get real-time support from a company without having to wait on hold via the phone for hours at a time. Live chat is a top-rated solution to provide customers with real-time guidance when they’re online; customers end chats happy and satisfied to have received immediate responses to their sales or support queries.
Customers are the foundation of any business, and the success of any company rests on the satisfaction of their clients. If the customers become unhappy with how they are treated, or if a company cannot meet their customer’s expectations, it will affect the brand reputation and customer loyalty.
In our digital world, speed and convenience are vital. In our guide, we cover why live chat is an essential tool for your business and how it benefits both your company and your customers.
What is Live Chat?
Live chat is a tool that allows your company to engage with website visitors and customers that need support, online sales, or those that have general queries through messaging. The tool is often used to initiate conversations when first-time visitors, returning customers, or existing users visit your website before they have any problems. Companies take the proactive approach so that all prospective and existing clients are aware of the help available to them immediately, which can improve how your brand is viewed. The use of this advanced communication channel is an excellent way to drive more sales as well as helping to retain existing customers.
Having an online tool for customers to receive immediate help allows your company to deliver a personalized customer experience; this enhances brand interactions by providing customers with a sense that the company cares about their clients.
Live chat is for more than customer service; it can be leveraged to give an advantage to marketing, sales, and technical interactions as well, which benefits the company as a whole.
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How Does Live Chat Work?
Live chat is a tool that can be installed onto any website by integrating a short snippet code into pages of your website. Once you have chosen the tool that is right for your company, a dedicated Managed IT services team can place the widget for the tool onto the website for your customers to begin using. When installed, your live chat advisors will have access to the dashboard to begin interacting with customers, who will see a small chat box for their interactions. Besides in business live chat and webcam sites are a huge and growing industry.
Why Do You Need Live Chat?
Live chat has become one of the most preferred communication channels used by customers; this is due to the convenience and speed that real-time support offers. Online chat encourages engagement from your customers for problems that they may have ignored due to the inconvenience of calling; that typically resulted in clients taking their business to your competitors. As live chat encourages engagement, it increases customer satisfaction and retention with faster support and resolution to any issues.
Wait time for email and telephone support are the main reasons why customer satisfaction can drop when a customer needs support. With live chat, you don’t have the problem of wait times as advisors can work on multiple conversations at once and usually respond to the initial contact within the first minute. Live chat is the most efficient tool for delivering a prompt response to customers; providing a faster response time gives the client an excellent experience and reduces the likelihood of a customer leaving. Offering customers the option of instantly connecting with the right department to get the desired solution to any questions, problems, or technical needs will leave them happy.
Why Is It Essential For Your Business?
Live chat can offer real-time engagement and is the key to boosting customer satisfaction. Understanding the core benefits of live chat can help you maximize how effectively the tool stimulates your business growth.
Chat histories are automatically recorded, and live chat supervisors or administration staff can analyze these transcripts to learn and understand the customer’s common pain points. With this analysis, your company can find practical solutions to address and resolve the issues your clients are having. As the speed of your responses increases through live chat, it enables support agents to resolve customer’s problems quickly, and this can have a positive impact on your business’s sales. The option to have an instant response in real-time also reduces the number of support requests your company will receive through email, as your technical advisors are able to solve any issues instantly through live chat. With all this in hand, your live chat function will instill trust with your customers and improve loyalty. New clients who use the live chat function to ask questions before making a purchase are more likely to spend more when they make their first purchase. The initial interaction during that first visit via live chat creates a loyal customer that is unlikely to take their business to your competition.
There are many customer service benefits that come with using live chat, and companies like STAFFVIRTUAL have handy guides to help you understand how to make the most out of your live chat.
What Are The Features?
There are a wide array of features for live chat, depending on the software you use for your company. Below we talk about the top three most popular features companies use to maximize their live chat with customers.
- Co-browsing: This feature allows your live chat advisors to interact and control a customer’s screen, which helps your advisors guide your customer through complicated transactions, forms, and demos.
- Chatbots: A complimentary feature that can provide initial contact on expected wait times if your agents are busy, or they can answer simple queries to offer your customers with quick solutions if they don’t need more tailored help. You’ll need a professional website maintenance services for this.
- Video Chat: Offer a truly personalized experience for your customers with video chat. It reduces the number of touchpoints that your customers experience, improves satisfaction, and creates a foundation to build long-lasting relationships with your customers. Your agents will no longer be part of a faceless company, which can be reassuring for many customers.
