Attract and Retain Customers with a Live Chat

Customer service is the number one feature for retaining customer loyalty. A live chat on your website provides the opportunity for current and potential customers to get real-time information about your product or service. For many small and medium-sized businesses, it may be costly to staff a live chat 24/7. This is where live chat services enter the picture. You can get a managed live chat solution that is staffed by people who know and understand your company. They are trained to upsell and cross-sell as well as answer customer service questions, so you customers have a good experience and want to come back.

Why Live Chat?

A live chat offers many more benefits than instant messaging, phone support, email and other communication platforms. A visitor to your website is there as a potential customer. If the visitor has to wait for business hours for a phone call or up to 24 hours for an answer to an email, they will most likely move on. According to an eDigital Customer Service Benchmark survey, 73 percent of customers got satisfaction with a live chat, 61 percent with email and 44 percent with a phone call. A live chat gives them the opportunity to ask questions immediately will not only keep them on your webpage but also increase the chance that they will buy.

Here are the top 5 benefits of a live chat:

• A live chat saves phone expenses and employee task time. A live chat service can handle multiple chats simultaneously, thereby reducing the need for more employees. This means the waiting queue for customer service is greatly reduced.
• A live chat increases sales according to Forbes magazine. High customer satisfaction increases conversion rates because the live representative can immediately talk the customer through to a sale, thus eliminating bounces to a competitor’s website.
• A live chat gives you an edge on your competition. Many retail outlets and other businesses have not caught on to the amazing potential of a live chat on their website. Since a huge number of people do their shopping online, your business needs to be in the forefront of catching and keeping paying customers.
• A live chat gives instant relief to customer’s pain points. If a person becomes frustrated because his or her online shopping needs are not being filled, a live chat is the solution. The representative can sooth the pain and turn it into a sale. It gives customers the chance to confirm that a product will perform as advertised or that they are getting the promised discount. A live chat service has access to chat histories and can discover the problems customers have and address them.
• A live chat resolves customer’s problems must faster than a help line. The service provider can link customers directly to the required documents or other content they need to resolve problems rather than walking the customer through troubleshooting and resolution. This cannot be done over the phone and may take days to do through email.

Today, comments and testimonials are posed online and on social media instantly and can cause severe damage to any business if they are negative. A live chat is one of the most effective ways to keep customers happy and loyal to make sure they post only good things about you.