Benefits of Live Chat

Customers are used to receiving what they want quickly, whether it is through instant sales or overnight shipment. Live chat emerged as that urgency shifted to customer service, quickly becoming a potent tool for businesses to engage clients and offer on-the-spot assistance.

Live chat has changed from a complementary support tool to a comprehensive platform for relationship building, sales, and marketing. However, the benefits of live chat go far beyond providing customers with a quicker and more comfortable means to reach your customer service team. Live chat solutions may increase agent efficiency, help you learn more about your clients, help you make better product decisions, and enhance the customer support experience.  

Here are the key benefits of live chat software you should be aware of if you’re considering using it for better customer engagement and service.

Key Benefits of Live Chat

1. Improve Customers Support Experience

Out of all the key benefits of live chat, the most important benefit is to improve the customer support experience. Customers appreciate live chat solutions because they can receive quick answers to their questions. With live chat, you offer your consumers a means to reach you when they have problems that they can’t resolve by themselves.

Comparatively speaking, this feels much better than emailing customer support because it is difficult to predict when you will receive a response via email. Also, customer satisfaction scores for live chat are higher than for other types of support because customers may receive assistance immediately.

2. Provide Around-The-Clock Assistance

If it would be favorable to your business, live chat assistance could be made available 24/7, but you could also choose a set of hours if you’d prefer. Your clients will have less cause to complain about their questions going unanswered if you extend your instant availability to the entire day.

Even if you cannot staff your live chat 24/7, customers should always have access to self-service support solutions like a knowledge base with information about your product or services.

Make sure it’s quick and straightforward for customers to access your help documentation if live chat isn’t an option. People are frequently more than happy to assist themselves but lack the necessary knowledge. Your clients will feel taken care of irrespective of what time of day they require support if your knowledge base and chat are set up properly.

3. Assists Your Agents in Building Rapport With Customers

Agents can adapt their conversational approach to suit the occasion by paying attention to the tone and sentiment of a consumer during an ongoing interaction. Agents can immediately establish a rapport and a helpful, friendly relationship by imitating the style and altering formality to meet a customer.

Compared to conventional methods, messaging platforms provide a more genuine manner to show your agent’s character. The benefits of live chat are well-known when it comes to building rapport with customers.

4. Aids in Customer Acquisition and Retention

Live chat is a great way to interact with potential and new customers and offer them the confidence they need to use your service/product and make purchases from your site. According to Forrester, customers who utilize live chat are 2.8 times more likely to buy your product/service than those who don’t. Even if your customers don’t need to communicate immediately, being accessible helps establish confidence in your business. 

5. Helps Inform Product Decision

Live chat support has the benefit of containing all the information you need to answer inquiries about your product. Depending on your live chat software, you should be able to store, arrange, and tag chats to filter them for later review.

You may get information that helps your support and product and marketing teams by spending time upfront to categorize and review discussions. Create a set of tags that all agents will use, then ask them to tag their chats as a primary starting point. To help identify recurring issues, think about organizing things like feature requests and bugs by inquiry type or topic. You’ll be able to identify the areas of your product that may need updating or additional support materials to assist your clients when you tag by type. 

6. Reduces Customer Repetition

One of the key benefits of live chat is to reduce customer repetition. As the chat is in written format the customer can get a transcript of the chat. Thus the customer can refer to the chat whenever the same problem or issue occurs.

Nobody likes to have to repeatedly explain an issue they are constantly having. 72% of customers anticipate a customer service agent to automatically know their specifics, such as their support history and product information, without asking. Agents can examine the text the user has provided while checking other data they can access using superior live chat software.

It might also contain information about the user’s current screen and comments about their previous contacts with other customer service agents. Some systems will even enable an agent to share a screen with the client during a live chat conversation or quickly share links and screenshots to help the client grasp a set of instructions, making everything very clear. 

7. Enhances Customer Engagement

You’ll probably notice more engagements once live chat solutions are easily accessible. Even though some may come from clients who prefer chat over phone or email support, a chunk of the growth will come from customers who discovered live chat and figured they might receive assistance instead of giving up and potentially abandoning your product.

Improved customer interactions present an opportunity to leave a positive first impression and boost repeat business. Set up your chat tool to show agent names and pictures, if possible, to enhance the welcoming atmosphere. 

8. Increase the Efficiency of Your Customer Service Team.

The effectiveness of your customer support representatives can also be increased via live chat. Unlike phone calls and emails, which can only have one response at a time, chat allows your service team to handle multiple conversations at once. Managing five at once is possible with minimal practice if service agents are working the chat line full of short and basic questions. However, for complex situations needing research and reporting, they may wish to tackle one or two at a time. 

Choose the best program for your team and workflows because functionality and chat handling differ amongst tools. Also, to ensure that your employees can concentrate and complete their tasks in one location, choosing customer service technology that can handle your chats, emails, and other support routes within one tool is an excellent idea. 

9. It Gives You an Edge Over Your Competition.

If your competitors don’t provide live chat support (or offer poor live chat support), you have the chance to offer quality assistance and win their customers. Consider this: If you were a customer trying to choose between two products, would you choose a business where you have to call customer support for answers, or would you be more enticed by the company that was easily accessible on their website?

Most individuals prefer live chat to call when they have inquiries. In actuality, nearly half of +customers choose live chat over the phone assistance. 

10. Boost Conversion and Sales

When visiting a website, prospective clients may have inquiries about the product or service. To help, ask them to participate in a demo of your product/service. But most websites include numerous forms and buttons for demos, which turn away potential customers. While visitors are still on your website and actively considering making a purchase, a live chat service can help you provide prompt responses.

You can also share calendars with your prospects using live chat capabilities, so they may schedule a time that works for them. When used as stand-by sales assistants, live chat can increase conversion and sales by being helpful when needed and unobtrusive when not.

11. Break Down Language Barriers

Today’s solutions make it possible for businesses to serve clients across borders. Building trust is necessary for expanding internationally, but you can only do that if you can communicate with customers in their language. Even direct interactions can become frustrating if neither party understands what the other is saying. Several live chat companies offer Google Translate integrations to overcome this language barrier and interact with clients in their language.  

12. Learn About Customer Behavior.

Today, you can collect high-quality customer data with specialized tools. Even though live chat is not one of those technologies, it can offer extra, unique insights into your clients’ purchasing habits. How did customers arrive at your website? Why have they not yet scheduled a demo? Is the client merely looking around your website? These are questions that a great live chat tool can help you answer and gain new insights from prospective clients. 

You may also use this data to improve the customer experience with live chat assistance. For instance, you’re starting the discussion too soon if most clients state they’re just browsing. You may get a close-up view of customer problems with live chat services. You can design your product to achieve the required results since you clearly understand what has to be fixed.

Achieve Customer Support Success With Live Chat

At 92%, live chat solutions have one of the highest customer satisfaction rates. Live chat is a service that many businesses use, but they rarely take advantage of it to the fullest. You can acquire a competitive edge by creating an incredible live chat experience for your customers.

Customer comfort levels with live chat technology are generally increasing today. Furthermore, they not only favor it but even anticipate it. The potential to boost agent productivity, coupled with the data you’ll gather, will help you succeed with live chat as part of your customer care strategy beyond enhancing the client experience.