The Most Important Benefits of Live Chat

Your clients have grown accustomed to instantaneous interactions with their friends, family, and coworkers, and they now want the same from your company. They expect you to keep them up to date on their purchases, answer their queries, and respond to their support needs as soon as possible.

The majority of firms are already aware of this expectation and are working to achieve it. The use of live chat is one technique to address this expectation.

In this article, we’ll go over the advantages of live chat in greater depth and how your company may take advantage of them.

But before we get into the benefits of live chat, let’s take a quick look at what it is and how it is used. This will assist us in better comprehending the advantages.

What exactly is live chat?

Live chat is a feature that allows you to engage with website visitors or app users in real time. The majority of live chat takes place in a window within an internet browser or app. Live chat can be used for a variety of purposes, including customer service, marketing, sales, and ecommerce.

Live chat serves as a link between your company and its customers. And it’s catching on quickly. Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 85 percent of enterprises will offer live chat on their websites or mobile apps.

Businesses are scrambling to implement live chat not only to meet customer expectations, but also to reap the rewards. According to research, live chat improves sales, customer loyalty, and revenue for 79% of businesses.In 2019, conversion rates increased by 3.84 percent, while revenue increased by 6%.

What are the advantages of using live chat?

As we’ll see in this section, live chat has a number of advantages. However, it’s vital to remember that these aren’t the only advantages that live chat may provide to a company. The advantages may differ depending on how and why a company employs this technology. For example, greater quality leads may be a benefit in marketing, while contextual customer help may be a benefit in customer experience.

As a result, in this section, we’ll look at some of the broad advantages that firms using live chat have in many industries.

1. Improved client satisfaction thanks to real-time help

Customer satisfaction has been shown to rise when live chat is used. Customers prefer live chat to phone or email assistance, according to multiple surveys. If you’re wondering why live chat is so good at delighting customers, it’s because it allows customers, prospects, and website visitors to get immediate help and find answers to their questions.

Another reason for live chat’s high customer satisfaction is that many companies provide an omnichannel live chat service. Customers will be able to have the same live chat experience on most digital channels and devices, including laptops, smartphones, and tablets. As a result, clients can communicate with a company via whatever channel is most convenient for them.

2. Higher conversion rates with fewer stumbling hurdles in the buyer’s path

Conversions are directly influenced by live chat. It ensures that prospects and consumers who encounter problems when purchasing online receive prompt assistance. In fact, after a helpful chat session with an agent, 38% of clients actually completed a purchase. Fewer hurdles in the purchasing process clearly contribute to faster and higher conversions.

People who use live chat spend 60% more on each purchase than those who don’t, according to research. A whopping 77 percent of customers will not complete a transaction if there is no live chat assistance.With live chat, the odds are set in favour of increased conversion rates.

Total Gym Fitness, a fitness equipment company, took it a step further and updated their mobile live chat with fresh features like a more intuitive user interface and product recommendations. In comparison to the simple live chat version, conversions increased by two and a half times (full report available to Gartner clients).

3. Personalized interactions for a better client experience

Live chat gives businesses a one-of-a-kind opportunity to provide a more personalised consumer experience. While improving customer experience by reducing question resolution time, tailored services are the icing on the cake. Are you curious as to how? Businesses may learn more about their customers and discover their pain areas, as well as places of disruption in the buying process, using live chat. Businesses may then eliminate these difficulties and improve the customer purchase experience.

Furthermore, businesses may learn more about their clients and their preferences through live chat conversations. They can use this information to provide more tailored product or service recommendations, which are referred to as “sticky products.” Sticky products are those that a customer is most likely to buy because they meet their wants or interests. Customers regard these products as highly valuable because they frequently meet their needs. Businesses can only offer these items if they understand more about their clients.

4. Lower costs while offering service to several clients at the same time.

Live chat is less expensive to manage and scale than other support channels. According to research, the cost per contact for live chat is only $5, but call centres have a cost per contact of $12. While a live chat agent can effectively manage numerous enquiries at once, phone support agents, who often provide both phone and email assistance, find it practically impossible to do so.

Using several browser windows or numerous desktop screens, live chat support workers can effortlessly provide quality responses to multiple users. This enables you to distribute clients across a smaller number of agents while also lowering the cost of scaling the team.

When a popular WordPress hosting company introduced live chat support, it rapidly became the most preferred method of contact. They were able to resolve 90 percent of queries using live chat in a single session, saving them both time and money.The cherry on top is that when they first launched this effort, their live chat availability was limited to 14 hours every workday.

5. Strengthen customer ties to increase customer retention.

Customer retention is a top objective for most firms because acquiring new customers requires a lot of time and money. Furthermore, in order to succeed in the long run, your company must establish long-term relationships with its consumers. Fortunately, you can do all of this via live chat.

With live chat, you can ensure that your consumers are happy with your services, collect feedback, and personalise the experience. You can also improve the quality of your products and services to better serve your clients. Using this information, you can determine where the customer is in the buying process and provide appropriate assistance or support, such as purchasing guides or helpful articles.

The stats back up live chat’s success in retaining clients. According to 63 percent of customers, they are more likely to return to a website where they had a live chat interaction.And 62% say they’d be willing to buy something from such a company.

How do you maximise the value of your live chat sessions?

While live chat has numerous advantages, as we’ve shown, it’s vital to realise that simply employing live chat sessions will not provide these advantages. These advantages are contingent on how you use live chat. This, however, is not a major undertaking. To get the most out of your live chat tool, keep these best practises in mind:

Begin small and keep track of your progress:

Begin by including a click-to-chat button in your mobile app or on your website. As your company grows, you may want to go toward proactive chats, where you offer assistance without your consumers asking for it. Make sure your users are aware that you offer live chat. Take notes on client happiness, agent performance, and knowledge base correctness from your first engagements.

Create a user interface (UI) for customers as well as service agents:

Both your customers and agents should be able to use the interface with ease. It should give clients simple access to assistance alternatives and assist agents in improving their performance and providing effective support.

Create a thorough knowledge base:

A knowledge base for live chat allows your team to discuss and collect information internally. It can also serve as a customer service centre. Effective live chat sessions necessitate the use of a knowledge base. According to Gartner, live chat agents without a knowledge base are half as productive as voice-based agents (full report available to Gartner clients).

Select the appropriate Service:

To properly manage your live chat sessions, you’ll require live chat software. Chat routing, proactive chat, chat monitoring, and chat rating are all features that most live chat platforms provide. Before you use a live chat service, read user evaluations on third-party websites like ours to learn from other people’s experiences. Also, book a software demo to get a hands-on look at the tool’s functionality and to clear up any questions you may have with the seller.