These days, we can’t imagine our lives without messaging. Be it on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp- our preferred mode of communication is text messages.
But why did the entire world choose this medium to communicate about literally everything, and not just call someone up?
It’s because messages help us have real-time conversations with our friends and family, while enabling us to multitask. This brings text messages into the business world as an important tool for communication.
Every sales representative faces a grave issue of not being able to attend to every client at once. Of course, it’s not within human capabilities that one can talk to multiple people simultaneously. If you are on a call, you can only do so much apart from it- maybe send an email, or enter the client data into the system, but how efficient is this multitasking?
This is where the Live Chat comes into play. In every sense of the phrase, it really is the Knight in the Shining Armor for every sales person out there!
How, you ask?
Besides the best marketing automation practices, live chat gives you inhuman powers of talking to multiple people at once!
Sounds like good news, no?
Live chats have been into talks since years now, customers prefer it over all the other communication channels, and it increases loyalty and conversions.
But what makes live chat so awesome? Let’s break down the benefits that Live chat has to offer.
Lots of businesses have discovered the advantages of Live chat as a tool that not only eases the customer service, but also the marketing and sales within the company.
- Live chat enables faster responses in real-time and generates more leads
It’s a fact that half the companies out there don’t respond fast enough to capture the potential clients. According to a report, 50% of adults will abandon a purchase if you can’t give them a quick answer to their question.
Many companies don’t even reply to their customers for five days after the enquiry, and I know it’s shocking. But your company doesn’t have to be a part of that system.
Your competitors are always on a lookout to steal your leads. But you can save your business from losing clients. How? By answering them in real-time.
People’s attention span has drastically reduced over the past few years. If they don’t get what they want in time, it’s almost impossible to hold their attention. Result? You lose them.
We live in a world where if your business does not meet a prospect’s expectation, you can’t succeed. And live chat does more for you than just decreasing the response time.
- You can reply to your leads even while being away
Now that you know that response time affects your sales, you must be thinking-
“What if I am not available to attend to the chats? Or if I am running around to get my work done?”
Well, Live chats also come with a solution for this little hiccup!
And the name of this solution is – Bots.
I know what you’re thinking- Bots are terrible!
But my friend, they are not!
Bots were once almost useless and indeed terrible enough to irritate the prospects out of the deal. But not anymore. They are now more in sync with the user experience and more helpful than ever!
While you are away, bots can keep your prospects entertained and answer their questions, and you can take over the chat once you are available. Everyone’s happy!
You can use bots to measure the user experience as well. Once a chat is over, bots can put up questions for your prospects to rate the chat and share their feedback, so that you can improve your chat support and deliver the best user experience that makes the prospect come back for more.
So, if replying within five minutes isn’t feasible to you every time, no problem! Just integrate bots into your live chat system and provide easy solutions to the prospects’ most common problems.
- Live chat helps you overcome objections immediately
Has it ever happened that while browsing a product, service, or a website, you were almost ready to make the purchase, but you didn’t? You came across something that drove you away, or had questions that weren’t answered by FAQs or any other support docs, and so you clicked back to Google and start searching for other ways to solve your problem.
I bet you’ve been there many times. Everyone has. And this is what’s driving your prospects away too.
No doubt, FAQs are a great way to solve common queries without having to employ any manpower for the same. But if you think it’s enough to cater to all the problems that your clients face, then you’ve got it all wrong.
FAQs only scratch the surface and answer the generic queries. However, clients can have different queries related to different products/ services, and in order to solve them, you need a tool that can be helpful in real-time. Yes, Live chats.
Clarifying client objections play a major role in lead nurturing and building lasting relations. And answering them on time is surely a way to do that!
Live chats not only help you answer them instantly but also gives you a freedom to actually talk to them over the chat and clarify their doubts personally.
- You can connect with the leads conveniently
The two key factors that affect the delivery of your high-quality customer service are the accessibility of your support team and the timeliness of your responses. Adding a live chat system to your website can meet both these demands as it reduces stress for the customers by meeting their needs immediately.
Unlike phone calls, you don’t have to make the clients wait on hold before speaking with a rep. Neither do they have to stay glued to their phones till their query is resolved. They can simultaneously work on other important things while chatting with customer support.
Of course, everybody hates long wait time, so do your customers. Hence, live chat brings you a solution that would make it more convenient for you to stay connected to the customers while solving their queries on right right time without bothering them.
- You get a treasure of customer information with Live chat
You read it right. Live chats get you more information of your customers. Sounds unbelievable? But it’s true.
The pre-chat surveys get you information on the clients and prospects while post-chat surveys get you proper feedback. Even during the live chat, a prospect shares his/ her concerns and requirements, and this information can be stored in the form of transcripts for later reference.
While you have to make separate notes during a phone call so that you don’t forget the important details, you don’t have to go through that much efforts in Live chat. With the saved transcripts, you can always go back and check what a certain customer required and how you can help them.
I know what you are thinking- “Wouldn’t web forms do the same? After all, their very purpose is to extract data!”
So here I would like to burst a bubble for you- Forms are dead.
No need to be so surprised. Forms rarely make for any better method of information extraction.
I never like to be given a page-long form in my face every time I browse through a website. Nobody does. It seems impersonal that you ask for someone’s personal information like name, phone number and email without establishing a rapport with them first. Hence said, forms are old-fashioned and you need not stay stuck to a decade-old strategy. There are many other effective tactics to generate leads.
- Live chat is cost-effective
Phone calls or emails are tedious. No one can cater to a greater number of clients with these methods in less time, not even the emerging email marketing practices. However, if the same rep uses live chat to connect with the prospects, they can actually engage more of them in the same given time.
Since your workforce is not killing themselves to reach out to the demands, you don’t have to put more money on the manpower and can make the best out of the existing ones.
Thus said, Live chats are cost-effective.
Also, not to forget the chatbots! You can resolve the easy queries with the help of chatbots while your sales reps get free from their busy work. This way, you can work faster without having to invest any extra money.
This in turn, enhances your reach and improves client engagement, generating more leads for you in less time.
Just imagine a proactive tool of communication that saves you money and brings in more qualified leads with least efforts from your side- Live chat is that tool for you.
- Live chat encourages engagement on your website
Your website is your online showroom, and you need to equip it with the best that technology has to offer. When you add live chat on your website, you provide your showroom with skilled sales agents just like you’d do to a physical showroom.
When such good sales reps are taking care of your prospects, sales are bound to increase!
The very first step in the sales process is that you engage the clients enough so that they don’t leave their purchase in-between the process. In order to convert the leads into closures, you need to make sure that they are hooked to your website from the very beginning.
Live chats are a way to do that with ease. With your sales reps helping the prospects in real-time, there are very less chances of any leads slipping through the cracks, which means more leads getting qualified, and converting into deals.
- Live chat reduces repetition
No customer wants to repeat the same information again and again. This could lead to increased number of unsatisfied customers which can hamper your growth. In fact, 72% of customers expect a customer service agent to know their contact details and past conversations.
Live chat is a powerful tool that enables the customer support executive to have access of the chat history which helps them have contextual conversations with their customers. For instance, when you receive a chat request from a potential prospect, you can go through the chat history and pick up the conversation right where it was left off. Chat history is extremely helpful to have quick conversations and avoid the repetitiveness.
- It provides personalized customer service
With a Live chat integrated with your CRM, you can extract the prospect’s information and directly save it into the CRM, so that you can offer personalized support to them.
Personalized support also helps you gain trust of your prospects. Since you tell them exactly what they want, they can believe that you are serious about serving them.
Also, the psychology of personalization goes deep. It’s a well-known fact that personalized marketing generates more leads. Similarly, personalized services engage the customers and even turns them into loyal ones.
- Increase customer retention
“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”
Customer retention will only increase with increase in satisfied customers. When you make your website more approachable with live chat, your prospects and customers are able to get their queries solved instantly.
So, when a customer receives immediate support, it increases their trust in your brand and in return you gain customers for life! Yes, it’s that simple. Nurture your customers and grow abundantly.
When you build a customer base that’s loyal, your reach will increase simply via referrals. And if that doesn’t make it a winning marketing strategy, nothing else will.
- Insightful reports to deliver better
One of the main advantages of live chat is the actionable insights it provides. This helps you monitor the performance of every customer support executive, so you can determine how many employees are performing at par and how many still needs to get training and additional support.
When you know what’s holding your growth back, you can put more efforts and work towards minimizing the errors. Therefore, with detailed reports of live chat, you can not only improve your team’s productivity but also deliver a better customer experience.
Summing up
In the digital era, you need to change your business strategy with every trend, and right now, live chat has become one of the most popular mode of communication between customers and companies.
Therefore, if you want to make your brand more accessible and build lasting relationships with customers, you need to implement live chat software into your business. There are oodles of amazing live chat tools available in the market with tons of useful integrations. And trust me, live chat is here to stay. So, adopting it into your website will only bring you more success.
Author bio: Parijat Lamba is an expert content writer who focuses on marketing and sales niche. Being a keen researcher, she loves to write about the emerging technologies and its influence on the marketing world. She is currently working with Salesmate CRM team to help companies as well as individuals grow digitally.