Good customer service is a no-brainer for both business owners and customers. In the age of advanced technology and ecommerce, it’s no surprise that consumers want their products and services faster. What about customer service? Because online shopping has become bigger than it was before, there is now a shift towards digital customer service. Yes, running an online store can be more efficient and prosperous for business owners. However, websites sacrifice the face-to-face benefits of customer service. This is where live chat software comes into play.
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What is Live Website Chat Software?
Live website chat software is a type of medium that lets businesses interact with its website visitors in real-time through instant messaging. Chat software can be used to start conversations with initial visitors, provide customer support, and serve customers that are returning. Ultimately, it’s an innovative and efficient way to increase sales, close more sales, and increase customer retention rate.
Not only does using a live chat software for your website provide a personalized customer service experience but it also gives you a better feel for your customer’s vibe. As mentioned before, digital customer service doesn’t have the benefit of face-to-face interactions so a live chat software would be able to make up for it.
Another great thing is that adopting a live chat software can be used by a variety of teams including marketing, sales, and customer support.
What Can You Use a Live Chat Software For?
Generating Leads
A live chat software can lead to high conversion rates. If someone from your sales team interacted with a first-timer on your website, they can offer better insight on a product or service. When a customer is more informed, they feel more comfortable with making a purchasing decision. Therefore, a live chat has the potential to convert visitors from window shoppers to paying customers.
Customer Support
A staggering 41% of customers expect a website to have live chat. Customers prefer to be able to instantly reach out to customer service over live chat instead of doing it through email or phone. Why is this? Customers prefer to chat with someone in real-time online. This can, in return, bring high satisfaction rates among customers if they are served through live chat.
Engaging with Customers
Think about when you’re shopping in person at a store. You’re greeted by the employees and they approach you asking if you need any help with your shopping. Even if you were just looking around, an employee is still engaged with you to make you feel important as a customer. This is what a live chat software can do. Giving new customers easy access to reach out to your sales or customer support team through chat can turn them into active customers.
Why is Having a Live Chat Software Important?
Customers highly prefer a fast and convenient way to get their questions answered on a website. Not to mention it’s also highly beneficial for your business from a marketing, sales, and customer service standpoint. Live chat software isn’t only for two way messaging, but it can also be used for data collection. Because live chat software provides transcriptions, the marketing and sales teams can use the information from them to study their target audience. The more data they gather, the more information they have to create digital marketing campaigns or content for your website that converts.
Furthermore, live chat can be useful to gain leads, reduce bounce rates, and increase sales. Now that you know some of the benefits of live chat software, let’s discuss more benefits it can bring.
Benefits of Live Chat Software
Easily Accessible
First and most importantly, live chat software is easily accessible. Customers can get annoyed if they have to spend time navigating through your site for contact details. With chat, they can just go to your website and start a session.
Highly Convenient
Live chat software provides a one-stop shop experience when it comes to interacting with a live person. In other words, there is minimal disruption to a customer’s day since they can just text their messages and do other tasks.
Increases Conversion Rates
When your business has a website, your ultimate goal should be for visitors to make a purchase or generate leads. This is what a conversion is. When you add a live chat feature to your website, not only do you give customers a better shopping experience, but your sales/marketing team the opportunity to convert website visitors into actual customers.
Reduces Website Errors
Having errors on your website is inevitable. Maybe your website coding has a glitch or your customers forgot their logins to access their profile. Whether it’s hitting 404 pages or a visitor is having an issue with a site, a chat option can be an easy solution to such issues.
Allows You to Gather Data
Chat sessions can be rich with data and key information. Pre and post-chat surveys can help you better understand what your customers are looking for including how happy they are with their online shopping experience. If you notice that customer feedback is mostly negative, you can easily pinpoint the issue and fix it.
A Discreet Channel
Having multiple social media pages can be beneficial for your business, but it’s also prone to negative feedback that can be seen by many. With a live chat option, it gives your customers a more discreet channel to voice their concerns and you can resolve issues in private without risking your reputation.
Removes Language Barriers
If you’re an international business or have a lot of customers from overseas, the live chat software has a multilingual feature. This makes it easier to communicate with customers from all over the world and opens up your market as well.
Low Cost
Research shows that live chat software has a significantly lower cost than utilizing customer service over the phone. As a matter fact, a chat session is 20-30% cheaper than resolving matters over the phone.
Connect Quickly with Customers
Nothing is more of a turn-off than being put on hold with that stock music blasting into your ear. Not to mention that waiting for an email response from customer service can take up to 24 hours. Customers want their issues resolved fast. With the live chat option, customers and businesses can instantly connect with a real person.
Fast Resolutions
Having a live chat software is highly efficient for solving customer issues. It takes only 42 seconds on average to resolve any problems that a customer might have.
Easy to Monitor
Live chat software makes it easier to monitor sessions and transcripts. This makes it efficient for your management team to handle quality control while also supervising the customer service agents
Avoid Cart Abandonment
Websites are prone to bounce rates, meaning that visitors might abandon your website and jump ship if they feel like they’re not informed enough on your products and services. A live chat software gives your sales team the opportunity to reach out to customers, which will lead them to complete their purchase.
Makes Your Business Approachable
Customers want to feel like they’re important and being taken care of since they are the ones who are giving you business. This is why customer engagement is very important, but an online business doesn’t have the option for face-to-face. So, how can we fix this? Through a live chat software.
Provides Personalized Service
What’s great about live chat software is that it integrates with your CRM. This allows you to use customer information immediately to provide personalized customer service.
Best Customer Support Software
Now that you know what a live chat software is and why it’s important, you also understand how great it can be as a customer support software. There are many website chat options available online. If you’re convinced to purchase a software for your business and wondering which one to buy, here are a few highly reviewed ones.
HubSpot Live Chat
Forget about purchasing a customer support software, this one is free!
HubSpot’s Live Chat software provides everything you need from customer branding, welcome messages that are targeted to new visitors, bots, support answers, and scheduling meetings.
What’s also great is that it comes with a CRM tool. This makes it easier to manage customer data and integrate it into the software.
Podium Webchat Review
This software allows you to instantly communicate with visitors via text message. That way you won’t need to be on a desktop to take care of business.
When visitors first come across the live chat window, they are prompted to enter their phone number to start an SMS conversation with you. From there you can answer questions, schedule appointments, make sales, and even keep in touch if they have to leave their computer.
Olark Review
Olark is popular among small businesses. Besides having a built-in CRM, it also has a search feature where you can easily pull qualitative data and feedback which can be vital to your marketing strategy.
Olark can also integrate with other platforms such as HubSpot and WordPress. This makes your web management and live chat software experience easier.
Olark’s rates start at only $12 per month on a two-year-contract, $15 for an annual contract, and $19 for a monthly billing basis.
Are You Interested in Adding a Website Chat Software?
Hopefully this article has informed you about the many benefits of having a live chat software. As a business who recognizes the importance of having a great website, a live chat software can do wonders for you! SEO Design Chicago provides live chat solutions to help your business.
Contact Us Today!