Are Live Chats Good or Bad for Websites?

Introduction

Live chats are becoming a definitive feature on any webpage nowadays, which offers instant customer support and helps resolve any customer issue and guide the customers with their queries. Live chat has become an inseparable part of the modern customer retention strategy of any existing brand. The live chat feature ensures that the brand keeps in touch with the customers and provides service and guidance in the fastest way possible. 

In this article, we will focus on some disadvantages and advantages of live chats to determine if live chats are good or bad for websites.

Advantages of live chat support

The advantages of live chat support are as follows-

Leads and enquiries:

Online live chat helps businesses generate leads and is the biggest reason why this feature should be added to any website. If the live chat support system is added to a website, the brand will get more questions and enquiries from potential customers. It will ensure the brand receives and collects more customer contact information to have fresh leads. 

Conversion rate:

Online live chat not only improves the number of questions customers can ask but also improves the percentage of conversion rate. The research from Forrester backs up this information, as it showed that the customers who engage in a live chat are 2.8x more inclined to purchase from the website than the ones who don’t. Customers would always want to look to chat with someone to clear their queries before making a purchase from a website. 

Expense and Ease:

The advantage of live chat is that it is easy to add to your website. The expense of availing and adding this service to your website is also a bare minimum. Some providers even allow their services for free if your live chats are limited to a small group of customers or operate within reasonable limits. 

Pain-points and content:

When you add a live chat app to your site, you will start gaining insight into the activities related to your customer and product. As you can determine the needs of customers through live chat, you will be able to introduce more customer-friendly services and resolve their concerns. It will help to develop helpful blogs, improve landing pages and inform ads. It will also save you the time to use online tools to serve you the exact purpose. However, not all live chats are always insightful.

Customer experience:

Implementing live chat can help brands communicate to customers and visitors on their website in a preferable and understandable language. Live chat support is the best way to meet customer expectations and assist them when their patience is running out. It is more humane compared to the other contact forms. 

Live chats are pretty advantageous since they help with customer enquiries, improve user experience and instill brand loyalty through thorough assistance to the customers and make them feel valued while increasing website visitors and revenue.

Disadvantages of live chat 

The cons of live chat support are as follows-

Invaluable enquiries:

Even though online chatting should be the primary stage of valuable enquiry or booking, more than half of most live chats are about completely unrelated topics that are regarded as noise. It can be a great dilemma since it will not give proper insight into customer behavior so necessary changes can be made to the services. 

Time and resources:

Many live chat support systems need different resources to reply to the customer. If the customers don’t get a prompt reply, there runs the risk of losing the enquiry and leaving behind a bad brand image. This situation becomes more complicated if the brand operates across different markets in different time zones. You will have to employ multiple team members and separate live chat support systems for iOS and Android users and will have to buy a paid plan for using the live chat feature for numerous customers. 

Online harassment: 

A fair amount of abuse can come from angry and impatient customers, time-wasting competitors, or some anonymous abusive people. So, you need to be prepared for such unwanted occasional abusive behavior and harassment.

Data and analytics:

You can miss out on a lot of data as live chats do not link well with analytics packages such as Google Analytics. It is difficult to track the live chats and determine the ROI of different marketing channels. Compared to the contact forms feature, it’s hard to track live chats. If you want live chat data for your company, you might need to check the integration features before choosing a particular service.

Live chat support has its definitive cons, which are minimal compared to the advantages it provides to your businesses.

Conclusion

Thus, to conclude if live chats are good or bad for websites, we can safely say that there are quite a few benefits of online chat, and they help websites with customer satisfaction and retention.

Temasys Communications, a market leader in communications technology, offers Skylink solutions that make it easy for companies to enhance customer experiences and services by utilizing live voice, video, instant messaging, and other features across all of their digital platforms.

Skylink Cube is a one-stop solution to provide hassle-free and worry-free human interactions on your websites without a code. You can subscribe to the Skylink Cube Essentials plan for free, which provides uninterrupted texting features and limited HD audio and video calling features on your website.

Schedule a demo with the experts to learn more about how to add and use the feature on your website for real-time customer support.

FAQs

Is live chat on websites safe?

A: Since any connection to Live Chat servers is encrypted with 256bit SSL protocol, it is safe to use.

Should you have a live chat on a website?

A: Chat meets the expectations of customers immediately and helps the website serve the customers better. So it is always a win-win situation for both parties.

What are the advantages of live chat?

A: Live chats help quickly address customers’ queries and resolve them.

Is live chat good for business?

A: Since live chat ensures increased sales with the highest customer satisfaction, it is always good for business.