For any business, good customer service can drive conversions and post-purchase satisfaction. However, an essential factor in a good customer support system is a prompt response, and that’s not always easy to achieve. This can be incredibly challenging for small businesses that have to manually communicate with customers via chats and emails.

Not to mention, to every email and message yourself (or by your employees) means that you either have to constantly be on the lookout for them or put them off after office hours. In short, manually receiving customer concerns and queries this way can lead to very long waiting times.

Remember: the faster your customer service response, the better relationship you have with your clients. Not to mention, their positive experience can either lead to more positive reviews or curb the effects of a bad initial transaction.

If you’ve seen more and more websites with Live Chat buttons in the corner of your screen, that’s because the response is faster than email and private messaging. How it works is live chat agents can handle multiple open chats simultaneously, which reduces the response time to mere seconds.

In some cases, the live chat feature is handled by intelligent chatbots. Sure, they can’t always answer every concern or respond to complicated requests, but they’ll be able to respond to basic customer questions that would’ve been clogging up your inbox.

In comparison to how replying to every email, direct message, and comment yourself, live chats are faster and more cost-effective.

If you’re not sold on live chats yet, here are some reasons why you should make the jump:

1. Live Chats Can Increase Conversions

When users find or visit your website, they have a specific need or problem. That need can be satisfied by reading informative and valuable content or availing of a product or service. However, even when you diligently put everything on your website, your hesitant customers will want to ask questions like:

• What can they get from signing up for your newsletter?
• Do you allow product returns?
• How much will the shipping cost?
• Do you take walk-ins?

These customers are likely still considering their options, so answering their questions can sway them to finally book an appointment or sign-up for your email list. Additionally, having a great and speedy experience during inquiries can boost brand reputation and build confidence.

Of course, they can always send you an email or find your Twitter, but live chats are more convenient. They can be put anywhere on your website, so users don’t have to leave. Plus, they’re fast. The quicker you can address your client’s needs, the better the customer satisfaction.

2. Live Chats Can Reduce Support Costs

Customer support can be expensive. Call center agents can take one call at a time, all while handling emails and (occasionally) social media accounts. In addition, live chats don’t require customer calls, so an agent can attend to multiple customers at a time.

Because you can manage multiple customer chats at once, you’ll require a much smaller crew to answer customer care requests, lowering your support costs. It frees up the queues quickly, and more customers are served as a result.

You can also redirect customer support requests from your social media accounts to your website’s live chat feature. For example, you can send automated messages that give people links to your live chat each time they send you a message on Twitter or Instagram. This can save smaller businesses from having to monitor multiple customer support channels at a time.

3. Live Chats Provide 24/7 Customer Support

Providing 24/7 customer service can be extremely difficult for smaller companies. As a result, you either relegate more company expenses to a full-time customer help desk or settle for doing customer support during business hours.

With the available tools and services nowadays, you can attend to your customers during operating hours and switch to a chatbot outside of it. Most client questions can quickly be answered by an AI, and then they can be referred to your company’s FAQs. If not, they can always send you an email and wait until business hours.

If your clients require more complex solutions, they can always be forwarded to a representative to sort things out. However, for basic one-and-done questions, live chats are efficient. For example, questions like, “What are your payment options?”, “Where do you ship to?”, and “How much is shipping?” are all easily-answered questions that can be settled in one chat. This way, you don’t have to worry about your emails getting clogged up by basic customer questions that can be resolved with a one-sentence answer.

4. Live Chats Improve User Experience

User experience is an essential factor in e-commerce and digital marketing. If your customers are having a terrible time navigating, reading, or using your website, they’ll likely associate those bad experiences with your brand. That said, if it takes a day before customer questions and concerns are catered to, it’s going to leave a bad impression.

Not only can live chats be a 24/7 service, they are overall just convenient for your customers. If they have concerns and questions, they no longer have to stop what they’re doing and send an email. Instead, your customers can speak to a live agent or chatbot and get some answers as soon as possible.

Live chats are usually placed in online storefronts and FAQs, but you can add them to all your pages if you need to. If a customer has been browsing your site and can’t seem to find what they’re looking for, they can easily click on the live chat bubble and ask for the information they need.

How could you take live chat to the next level? Consider chatbot automation.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last five years, you have heard of chatbots. These little automated chat software take on conversations autonomously through your website or even messaging applications like Facebook Messenger.

So, what do chatbots have to do with live chat?

While live chat is an excellent tool to increase conversions and reduce support costs, it is still a resource-intensive tool. Someone (or, more likely, many someones) has to monitor the chat and jump into conversations. 

Chatbots will help alleviate some of that cost and the need for intense resources. Using a chatbot platform like ubisend, you could automate the majority of the repetitive enquiries your typical live chat agent has to manually answer day-in-day-out.

And automating FAQs is but the first step.

With the right platform, you can go even further and automate entire processes. Do you need your chatbot to handle refund processes? Not a problem. It can collect customer information, order numbers, card details, and process the refund (if the customer qualifies); all of it is entirely automated.

Any process you may think of that is repetitive, you can automate with a chatbot.

Does this mean live chat is out of the door? Absolutely not. In fact, live chat is an integral part of the chatbot experience. If the chatbot struggles to help or the customer simply wants to speak to a human, it can trigger a simple fallback to live chat.

While ubisend is a chatbot-first platform, it includes a powerful live chat feature for that exact reason. A chatbot can handle up to 80% of enquiries automatically. But, for the rest, it can step aside and let humans do what they do best: help with deep, complex, and sensitive queries.

Bottom-line

Back then, people weren’t as confident to transact through the internet. These days, online transactions happen all the time. This means more and more people are visiting company websites to read blogs, subscribe to email newsletters, and engage in online transactions.

As your brand grows, so will the site traffic and customer emails. You don’t want to be left dealing with hundreds of customer inquiries on top of all the operational tasks you need to run the site.

Author’s Bio

JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the very few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.