Have you been wrestling with the idea of integrating ‘live chat’ with your website?

If you have, this piece will hopefully ease some of that tussle.

A study by FurstPerson revealed that 77% of customers wouldn’t make a purchase on a website that doesn’t offer live chat support. Therefore, it clearly isn’t just an industry trend anymore; live chat is something customers want.

Another way to decide whether you should use live chat is by reversing the roles. If you were a customer to your own business, would your experience improve if you had the option of live chat?

If your answer is yes, read on to find out some benefits of live chat and support:

1. It increases sales 

Live chat instantly lets you connect with potential customers.

Through traditional customer support, you usually only get to interact with users who are in the ‘desire’ or ‘action’ phase of a consumer buying journey. But with live chat, you can tap into the upper levels of the funnel too, i.e., customers who are in the awareness or interest phase.

It has been statistically proven that conversions increase by at least 20% when you have the option of web chat on your website.

2. It reduces costs 

In its essence, the option of live chat is similar to offering support on call; you get to understand and solve the queries of your customers in real-time.

The primary advantage of live chat over calling is reduced expenses. Not only do you save on calling charges; since one person can easily chat with two or three customers at a time, you can also cut back on the number of people to hire in your customer support team.

In fact, according to Forrester, web chat is 17% to 30% cheaper than a phone call.

3. It resolves issues faster

With email communication or even phone calls, customers’ queries often require frequent redirection until they get resolved. A customer may wish to speak with a supervisor, or the call may get diverted to specific departments (the case remains similar with email).

With live chat, you can either just copy-paste the steps your customers should take to solve an issue or enable screen-sharing and guide them through the process.

Moreover, the response time with live chat is seen to be far quicker, when compared with other means of support:

(Source)

4. It’s convenient for customers

In today’s fast-paced world, people aren’t willing to dedicate time to customer support calls.

If you do give users the option to chat, they can use it as per their convenience, while multitasking or even while travelling.

Think about how convenience is the driving factor when it comes to shopping online. So, why not capitalise on this factor to boost sales for your business?

5. It helps utilise data efficiently

Recording phone calls and listening to them is a very time-consuming and monotonous way of extracting customer service insights.

When using web chat, you can simply make use of analytics tools to study the data collected. Most tools let you create custom reports so you can get whatever insight you need.

6. It offers an edge 

Although we have all been using live chat for personal communication, very few businesses use it to communicate with customers. A study by SuperOffice found that only 9% of the 1000 websites they studied used this channel of customer service.

That’s a surprising discovery, given its popular preference by customers. Consider the following experience as narrated by Josh Ledgard, founder of Kick Off Labs:

(Source)

7. It improves post-sales service 

Once customers have bought a product or service, they will need servicing at some point later. And knowing that the option for live chat is available helps customers feel more confident.

When compared with other channels of customer support, live chat was the clear winner, with a higher percentage of satisfied customers: 73% as compared to 44% for phone users.

Final thoughts

All in all, using live chat the right way can really help boost your sales. Businesses need to embrace technology to grow, and live chat is bound to get even more popular when it comes to customer support.