It's all about making your customers want to come back and shop with you again. Customers are necessary for any firm to succeed. However, there must be a balance: while you should put in a lot of effort in acquiring new customers, you should not abandon your existing customers.
Getting a new client is six times more expensive than keeping an old one. And the most significant way to keep your customers pleased (along with a good product or service, of course!) is to provide good customer service. Good customer service, of course, works on new customers as well.
Benefits of Live Chat Customer Service
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However, the benefits of live chat go far beyond simply providing your consumers with a faster and more comfortable means to contact your customer care team. Live chat may improve agent efficiency, help you get to know your customers better, and inform your product decisions, in addition to boosting the customer experience.
Let's look at the top nine advantages of chat with customers.
1. Customers Get a Better Support Experience with Live Chat
Customers love live chat customer service because it allows them to get immediate answers to their issues. You give clients a means to contact you right when they have a query or a problem they can't address via live chat. Chatting is considerably more pleasant than sending an email to a support team; with email, you never know when you'll hear back. Customer satisfaction ratings for live chat are likely to be higher than for other support methods because of the speed with which you can get help.
2. Customer Acquisition and Onboarding are Aided by Live Chat
Live chat is an excellent approach to communicate with potential and new consumers and offer them the assurance they need to utilize your product or make a purchase on your website. According to Forrester, consumers who use chat are 2.8 times more likely to convert than those who do not. Even if your consumers don't need to talk right away, being ready to assist them creates trust.
3. Your Agents Can Create Rapport with Clients Using Live Chat
Agents can monitor a customer's tone and sentiment during a live chat customer service and alter their styles to fit the circumstance. Agents can immediately create rapport and establish a warm, helpful relationship by replicating or changing formality to meet a customer's style.
Messaging platforms also allow you to show off your agents' personalities more genuinely than traditional channels.
4. Chat With Customers Saves Time by Reducing Repetition
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Nobody wants to have to explain the problem they're repeatedly having. In fact, 72% of consumers expect an agent to know their personal information, such as support history and product information, without asking for it. Agents can read the content provided by the consumer while also reviewing other details they have access to using good live chat customer service software. This information could include the consumer's current screen and notes from past conversations with customer service.
During a chat conversation, some systems allow an agent to share a screen with the customer or provide links and images to help them better understand a set of instructions, making everything crystal clear.
5. Live Chat Increases the Efficiency of Your Customer Care Personnel
Live chat can also assist your customer care agents in working more efficiently. While a person can only be on one phone call or respond to one email at a time, they can handle multiple conversations at once with chat.
They may want to limit themselves to one or two for more complicated issues that require research and reporting, but if they're manning a chat queue full of short and simple questions, addressing five at once is possible with some practice.
6. Live Chat Allows You to Provide 24/7 Chat Support
With careful scheduling, live chat customer service can be made available 24/7 if helpful in your business or any other hours you like.
Customers would have little reason to complain about their questions getting unanswered if you extend your instant availability to encompass the entire day. Even if you can't provide 24/7 chat support, your self-service support solutions, such as a knowledge base with product content, are available at any time.
7. Customer Engagement Improves With Live Chat Customer Service
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When you make live chat available to your customers, you'll almost certainly witness increased engagements. While some of that growth will come from customers who move to chat instead of email or phone support, some of it will come from users who discovered chat and realized they could seek help instead of giving up and maybe abandoning your product.
8. Live Chat Can Help You Stand Out From the Crowd
If your competitors don't offer live chat (or provide poor chat support), you have the opportunity to do it well and earn their business.
Consider this: if you were a consumer in a hurry and needed to choose between two items, would you call customer service to get your questions addressed, or would you be more attracted by the firm that had information readily available on their website?
How to Provide Outstanding Live Chat Customer Service
If you're utilizing or planning to use live chat, here are seven things to keep in mind to guarantee that your chat assistance is on par with your email service:
∙ Always Begin by Introducing Yourself
A good customer service interaction is a discussion, not a transaction.
By introducing yourself to the customer, you personalize the engagement and frame it as a conversation rather than a customer and corporation transaction.
∙ Be Quick
Live chat customer service is a channel in which speed is crucial. Customers like live chat because of the immediacy it delivers, which is by far the most often cited reason. Regarding response times, 60% of customers don't want to wait more than 60 seconds for a response, while the average initial response time hovered around 23 seconds.
∙ Make a Promise
We consider it a failure on our part if a customer sends a chat message “checking in” on the status of their help request. Consumers who proactively reach out to us report satisfaction levels that are around 10% lower on average than customers who do not enquire, according to Groove testing. Even if you can't solve the problem right away, tell the customer when they may expect to hear from you in your initial discussion. While you can't always guarantee a solution by a specific date, you can always ensure a solution. Keeping that commitment keeps the consumer informed about the status of their request and gives you another chance to earn their trust.
∙ Make Chat Access Extremely Simple
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When a customer approaches you for assistance or to ask a question, they've already had a less-than-ideal encounter. Make things worse by making them work to figure out how to contact you. Put your live chat widget on every page to make it absurdly easy for customers to contact you via live chat customer service. This way, they can obtain support from anywhere.
∙ Make Use of Links
Scrolling through lengthy emails is tedious and time-consuming; scrolling through long live chat conversations is even worse. We want to eliminate anything annoying or tiresome because we want to build customer loyalty by lowering customer effort. Having a knowledge base containing articles you can link to can save your customers the time and effort to navigate a long email.
∙ Make Use of Time-Saving Techniques
To answer a frequent client inquiry, you don't always need a whole knowledge base article. A knowledge base article isn't always appropriate (for instance, if the question involves confidential account data or billing information). That's where your pre-programmed typical responses come in help.
Introducing Strikingly
Strikingly launched live chat on January 1st, 2016, as a type of New Year's gift to our clients. Our goal was to resolve issues faster, delight clients, and develop superfans in the process. Our consumers, as well as ourselves, were not disappointed. We averaged 96 percent satisfaction on live chat alone by the end of the first year.
We strive to react to our customers as quickly as possible at Strikingly because we appreciate the speed and respect our customers' time. In one minute, anything can happen. While it may be brief for some, it may be the longest chat wait time for others. To date, our average first response time has been established at seven seconds, which is significantly lower than the global and software industry average.
We believe that our clients come first at Strikingly. We provide live chat customer service help 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on our website. Whether you are already a client, considering signing up, or simply checking what we have to offer, we strive to provide good customer service possible by responding to any questions you may have via our website's chat feature.
If you use Strikingly to create a website, you can also use our live chat tool to deliver the most outstanding customer care to your site's users. Our live chat feature can significantly assist you in retaining customers by allowing you to develop a relationship with them. It will also provide you an advantage over your competitors that rely primarily on email or phone assistance, both of which are inefficient methods of delivering excellent customer care.
Conclusion
Customers are becoming more and more accustomed to using live chat technologies. Not only do they prefer it, but they also demand it.
Aside from improving the customer experience, the potential to increase agent productivity, paired with the data you'll collect, will help you succeed with 24/7 chat support as part of your customer support strategy.
