Why Live Chat is a Must-Have for Your Website
Why Live Chat is a Must-Have for Your Website
Since shopping has been easier than ever since it is accessible with a click of a finger, the personal touch of in-person customer service often feels like a distant memory in the post-pandemic era, and the concept of live chat is the closest we’ve ever gotten to replicate the in-person experience.
The Lost Art of In-Person Customer Service
Remember the days when you’d walk into a brick-and-mortar store, and a friendly customer service executive would welcome you with a warm smile, ready to assist with your every need? That personal touch and assurance that help was just a few steps away created a comforting shopping atmosphere. However, with the shift towards digital shopping, this experience became something of a rarity.
The concept of live chat is to humanise the digital experience of shopping.
With a live chat solution, we might not get a big smile, but we have someone to greet us and help us out throughout the entire process.
What is Live Chat?
Live chat is not just a feature for communication; it’s a gateway to instant, personalized assistance in the digital world.
It is a technology that lets companies engage with their users when they visit the organizations’ online pages.
A live chat solution is just like any other messenger service as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. It’s a software to chat with others and share media files. While other messenger services bring people closer, live chat brings companies closer to their customers.
How Does A Live Chat Solution Work?
When a visitor wants to reach out for assistance or engage in a conversation, all they need to do is type a message in the chat window. This simple action initiates a connection with a live chat system, which can operate in one of two ways.
Firstly, live chat can be manned by real human representatives from the organization. These representatives are there to provide immediate and personalized responses, just like the helpful store associates in a physical brick-and-mortar store.
Alternatively, organizations can deploy an AI solution which is designed to recognize and respond to a predefined set of common queries posed by visitors. While they may lack the human touch, they can provide quick and efficient answers, ensuring that visitors receive the information they need without delay.
Live chat is revolutionising customer support. It helps a company serve its customers in real-time and in a consistent manner. By providing a better customer experience, it’s ensuring companies achieve higher customer satisfaction.
There are many reasons to love the live chat widget. In this article, we’ll talk about 10 reasons why you should love, we mean, live chat.
Why Should You Add A Live Chat Solution to Your Website?
1. Reduce Costs
Let’s begin with monetary benefits.
Operational costs are an important expense for all companies. A live chat widget on your website will greet all your customers and answer their basic questions. If the question is complicated, an online agent can take over and resolve the issue. This way, your company can engage with more users with fewer agents.
Not only are you not paying for extra agents to handle customer support, but your company is also saving on the training and other overhead costs involved. That’s why live chat support is 17-30% cheaper than phone support.
Suggested Reading: Save Money By Switching To Customer Support Automation
2. Increase Sales
As they say, time is money. And it’s 100% true in the case of live chat. It lets you support and engage customers 24×7. By sharing the right information at the right time, the chat service helps users make quick decisions.
According to a study, 38% of people said they purchased from the website because of the live chat. The same study goes on to say that 63% of people are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat support. If you’d like to see proof, read about one of our customers, AcadGild, as they increased their overall conversion rates by 240% using Verloop.io’s live chat.
3. Improve Customer Service
Customer service is the assistance and advice you provide to people who buy or use your product/service. The faster and more accurate it is, the better. Engaging with your online visitors through a website chatbot is a critical discipline to master. Getting it right is vital for the health of your overall brand.
In a case study we did with Aslam Sheikh, Head of Customer Service at MediBuddy, he said the live chat’s powerful FAQ features were fast and accurate enough to rival real-time human support. This ensured them higher CSAT scores.
4. Faster Resolution Time
Truth be told, customers love instant solutions. In our fast-paced world, we want immediate response from a company. While emails have a 24-48 hours response time and most phone calls don’t get answered, live chats respond immediately and resolve issues in minutes.
Solving customer issues quickly becomes particularly tricky during peak hours/seasons. Companies struggle to answer all questions, let alone answer them instantly. But with a live chat app, this is possible, as seen in the case of Nykaa who handled 1.6 million unique queries in 30 days and resolved them in less than a minute.
5. Scale
We have seen how fast a live chat can support your customers. But as your company grows and attracts more customers, fielding customer queries at scale becomes important to maintain quality customer experience.
Using a customer support automation tool, you can serve the needs of all customers immediately and reduce your average response time. Read about how O2 Spa achieved zero missed chats and instant response times at scale (2000+ daily customers) using Verloop.io’s live chat app.
6. Customer Convenience
Most customers would like to talk to a company at a time convenient to them. A live chat software on your website can provide 24×7 customer support. Even if an agent isn’t online, the chatbot can answer commonly asked questions and take customer details for the agent to get back to when they log in later.
What’s also interesting is that this feature lets your customers chat with you while they are doing something else.
7. Gather Information
Collecting information about the customer is very important in improving customer service. With the help of a live chat feature on your website, you can record and save all chats. This information will give you data on customers’ pain points and help you support them better.
With 75% of people preferring live chat over any other channel, using live chat data will help you increase your website’s user experience and leave a lasting impression on your visitors.
8. Reduce Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is a gigantic issue for e-commerce companies. It’s a term used to describe a scenario where the website visitor leaves the page before completing the desired action.
Enter live chat. It’s a go-to place for your customers to get accurate product information in real-time. You can program the chatbot or train the agent to guide your visitors in the right direction. A streamlined experience like this is a surefire way to help them decide sooner.
9. Expand Market Reach
With the rapid expansion of globalization, customers are not limited to your country. However, this increases the challenges involved in customer support. Different time zones and languages are two of them.
With a live chat feature, you can now serve your overseas customers as easily as your local ones. You don’t have to pay extra for international call prices or be limited by business hours. Also with multilingual AI solutions, you can talk to your customers in local languages, like our client WaterProjects, who generated leads using our language-agnostic chatbot.
10. Improve Your Agents’ Productivity
In conventional customer support channels, the agents handle all calls and emails. They spend a lot of their time answering the same questions again and again hence, reducing their productivity.
Before handing over the chat to an agent, a live chat screens the conversations and answers repeated questions. The agents only respond to complicated questions. The live chat software also collects information from the customer so that the agent has relevant details to solve the query quickly.
It is predicted that by this year (2023) it is projected that the live chat market value will reach $997 million.
As we can see, it is increasing in popularity.
Clearly, the advantages are plenty. As more businesses go online, this will be the preferred method of customer support. So what are you waiting for?
Add live chat to your website with Verloop.io – the ideal choice for seamless integration. We offer cutting-edge solutions to elevate your customer support. Our platform streamlines support through intelligent AI, automated ticketing, and multi-channel integration, freeing up human agents to focus on complex inquiries.
Learn more about Verloop.io’s Live Chat features here: Elevate Your Live Chat Support: 20 Key Tips for Exceptional Service
Schedule a demo with us today and take your customer support to the next level.