The Effectiveness of Live Chat

This article provides an overview of the customer service experience with live chat. Also, we will explain the effectiveness of live chat and its benefits.

Introduction

In order for a business to grow and flourish, customer service is a crucial component, which plays an instrumental role in building a lasting customer base and enabling the company to thrive in the long run. Both your business as well as your customers will enjoy numerous benefits as a result of implementing live chat support to the customers.

It is becoming increasingly important for businesses to offer live chat as an integral part of their operations. The reason for the effectiveness of live chat is that providing customers with a way to communicate with them in real time is an excellent method of connecting with and supporting them.

The effectiveness of live chat services for a customer is around 73 percent, compared to just 61 percent for e-mails and 44 percent for phone calls, which are the most common forms of communication.

However, it is not just the satisfaction levels of your customers that will benefit; instead, customer retention will also be improved as well. The fact is that over 63 percent of consumers claim that if a website offers live chat, they are more likely to return to the website in the future.

Having said that, why is live chat so popular with customers? Let’s find out.

5 Advantages of Online Chatting

Listed below are some reasons why live chat is winning in the battle for the hearts and minds of your customers and why you need to add it to your customer service channel as soon as possible:

Live chat increases sales, as studies have shown time after time – and businesses are reaping the benefits. Live chat can increase conversions by 3x to 5x and deliver ROI of up to 6000%. Customer satisfaction scores are three times higher with live chat versus those without it.

One thing is clear from these numbers: live chat support is effective for generating leads and closing sales. One of the key benefits of live chat on a website is that your team has many more opportunities to turn visitors into paying clients or customers since visitors can chat with your support staff and sales team instantly (and vice versa).

The effectiveness of live chat is that it is the most preferred service because it provides customers with the opportunity to have their questions answered right away.

When you offer live chat to your customers, they can reach you at exactly the time when they have a question or a problem that they are not able to solve on their own. Emails to support teams are difficult to predict when you’ll get a response; hence, live chat is much more reliable.

Live chat is often rated higher than other forms of customer support due to its immediate access to assistance, which is likely to be the reason for the high customer satisfaction ratings.

During an ongoing chat, agents can notice the tone and sentiment of a customer’s message and adapt their styles according to the situation. In building a friendly and helpful relationship with a customer, a customer service agent can mirror a customer’s style or modify the formality of the conversation to match the customer’s.

The use of messaging platforms also offers a more genuine way to showcase the personalities of your agents than through traditional channels.

The effectiveness of live chat is that it can improve customer service agents’ productivity as well. Chat allows users to handle multiple tasks at once, while phone calls and emails are limited to one.

When dealing with a chat queue full of quick and simple questions, they can handle five at once with some practice, but when it comes to trickier issues requiring research and reporting, they may want to stick to one or two.

It is important to choose the software that works best for your workflows and team since features and chat handling vary from tool to tool. Ideally, you should find customer service software that lets your agents handle chats, emails, and other support channels in one place, so they can stay focused and get their work done.

The effectiveness of live chat is that it can be made available 24/7. Your customers will have little reason to complain about their questions not being answered if you expand your instant availability to cover the whole day so that they can have answers when they need them. If you aren’t able to keep a chat staffed around the clock, you’ll still be able to provide self-service support options, such as a knowledge base filled with articles related to your product, at any time. This is one of the key benefits of live chat for customers.

Disadvantages of Online Chat

Online chat offers so many benefits that it’s hard to think there could be any cons to using this service on your website. Although minor and avoidable, we would like to point out a few:

Incompatibility With Mobile Platforms

Some live chat services do not work well with mobile devices, so that can cause a bad experience for customers. However, you can always shortlist the service provider that offers flawless service on mobile as well as desktop devices.

24/7 Customer Service Support Requirement

Since the Internet is available 24 hours a day, customers of your website may require customer care at any time of day or night. As a result, you may need to consider time zones and accessibility to evaluate whether you can provide 24-hour service. Otherwise, you risk disappointing consumers who require assistance outside your regular office hours.

Conclusion

Temasys offers live chat systems and phone support systems to ensure organizations can better maximize the lifetime value of their customers in the digitally-driven world we live in today. 

With Temasys’ live chat and phone support systems, revenue is increased, and customer loyalty is maintained, while traditional customer service software focuses primarily on solving tickets and cases, limiting the ability to provide personalized, people-centered service.

About the Author:

Temasys

We’d love to hear your ideas and talk about how we might work together.

Our latest posts