Responding quickly to potential leads makes conversions much more likely.
Having live chat on your website is a great way to make sure prospects are interacted with immediately. Live chat is especially important if you only sell online.
While email and phone can help with prospect queries and objections, customers want help right away. They don’t want to have to wait for an email response, be left on hold, or wait for it to be business hours to be able to contact you.
If you only use phone and email as a form of contact and reply only during business hours, prospects could be waiting up to 72 hours for a reply.
Most consumers will not wait that long. They’ll start looking for alternatives and if they get what they need from another brand, they’ll purchase with them.
If you find yourself lacking leads, having a lot of abandoned carts, and low conversion rates you may be able to fix these issues by adding live chat.
Keep reading to understand all the reasons why you should install live chat on your website.
Benefits of Live Chat
Live chat, when used correctly, will ultimately help you get more conversions. It can also help increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The following are 12 great reasons why you need live chat on your website.
1. Allows for 24 Hour Customer Service
Live chat allows you to use bots so that you can respond to queries at any time even if your staff aren’t working.
Bots can offer customized responses to a range of questions. They can provide pre-programmed answers and suggest content that may help the prospect.
You or your staff can then offer responses once you’re active again if the bot’s responses didn’t help the prospect fully.
Real Agents vs. Bots
If possible, it’s ideal to always have at least one real agent available, whether this is combined with using bots or not.
Consider hiring live chat reps from international locations. This can be done most easily using a recruitment agency or freelancing website.
Having reps from different locations around the world means that at least one real agent can be working and available to help customers most of the time.
2. Live Chat’s Quick Response Time Equals More Leads
Response time to questions and concerns and the number of leads you keep are inversely correlated. As response time increases, leads decrease significantly.
You need to be responding within a maximum of five minutes after a question is asked.
If that’s not possible, set up something to respond such as a bot. As mentioned, this will automatically suggest content that can help the prospect and you can then provide a human response as soon as possible.
Mac Cosmetics uses live chat to answer questions and connect
visitors with make-up artists for professional advice.
3. Decreases in Abandoned or Uncompleted Conversions
Issues such as abandoned carts and failed installations or sign-ups are often due to prospects not having an answer to a question or encountering issues with a process.
Having live chat on your website can help resolve these issues quickly resulting in the conversion being completed. Those that use live chat are in fact up to three times more likely to buy (or complete your desired action.)
To discover when visitors are bouncing from your website instead of completing an action, look at Google Analytics. Then have a chat box with the option to interact appear before the average exit time.
If most people bounce after 20 seconds, for example, have it appear when visitors have been on the page 10 to 15 seconds.
4. Helps Overcome Objections Quickly
You may lose prospects because your FAQs don’t provide the information they need or because they want to discuss something in more detail.
Those with objections can be converted but they need access to someone to discuss and resolve objections quickly.
If they don’t have access to quick problem resolution, they will likely look to another brand.
Make your website even better by implementing these 9 tips to make your website user friendly
5. Helps Discover Customer Pain Points
Pain points are needs that customers have that have not been addressed or problems customers have that have not been solved. Using live chat on your website allows you to pick up on these pain points and address them in advance.
Live chat history can easily be stored. You can, therefore, look at all conversations and see what common needs or problems are arising.
You can then adjust your strategy to eliminate these issues earlier, if possible, to avoid the need for prospects to reach out for help.
For example, if a common question is being asked, you can add it to your FAQs page. Or, if customers often want something you don’t currently offer, consider adding this thing to your product or service line.
6. Improves Customer Service and Loyalty
The above points like providing 24-hour support, helping to quickly overcome objections, and discovering and acting on customer pain points will all lead to improved customer satisfaction and ultimately stronger customer loyalty.
Chat offers the prospect what they want when they need it. It’s extremely convenient and live chat is proven to have high customer satisfaction levels. It results in customer satisfaction rates that are 10% to 30% higher than those found with email or phone support.
Being able to access helpful and immediate support makes the prospect feel better about becoming a customer. Having access to quick support throughout shipping and consumption of the product equally helps with satisfaction and will lead to increased brand loyalty.
Salesforce uses chat bots to help with simple queries and connect users to real agents.
7. Reduces Customer Service Costs
Using live chat is much less expensive than phone support. You won’t incur any toll charges and employee costs are lower.
Lower employee costs are in part due to customer service representatives being able to handle more customers at once.
This means that multiple customers can be helped at once giving the chance for multiple customers to be converted at once by the same rep.
8. Offers Competitive Advantages
9. Expands Market Reach
Having live chat on your website can help when expanding the geographic location you reach.
If you decide to start reaching a nationwide or even international market, for example, by offering worldwide shipping, these new customers will need support.
It may be inconvenient to have to call a long-distance number or wait for an email reply if the customer is in a different time zone to your support staff.
Having live chat means that you can reach and help customers 24/7 anywhere in the world.
10. Allows For Proactive Outreach
Infinity project management uses proactive chat so that live chat
appears as soon as users enter the website.
11. Increases Sales
All of the above benefits of live chat should ultimately be leading to more sales.
Customers will be more satisfied with the pre-purchase service they receive and will quickly get all the information they need to make a purchase decision.
Providing support and answers to questions immediately increases the chance of a conversion drastically.
A large majority of customers need some type of support when purchasing a product, especially if you operate online only. Therefore, customers are more likely to purchase from websites that offer live chat. They can quickly get questions answered and reduce concerns.
Increased Time on Site
Additionally, live chat keeps prospects on your website where the sale will take place. This alone can make it more likely that they will convert.
They simply need to click out of the chat to purchase or you can send them a direct link to where they can automatically complete the purchase.
12. Access to Reports and Analytics
How to Set Up Live Chat on Your Website
To have live chat on your website, you’ll need to install a plugin. There are many options to choose from and lots of these offer free versions.
The following are some of the most popular choices.
WP LiveChat Support
WP LiveChat Support (or 3CX Live Chat) is a popular choice for those who build their website with WordPress CMS. It’s a free plugin and allows for chat management from inside the WordPress dashboard.
You can have multiple chats going at once, customize how the chatbox looks, and create custom messages for when you cannot respond immediately.
If needed, you can pay for a premium version with more features. These include the ability to have you initiate chat with prospects and have the chatbox pop-up on certain web pages automatically.
Tawk.to
Tawk.to is a free live chat widget. It offers a lot of features and is easy to install.
This chat widget allows for as many chat agents as you need to be active. It can also be used through a mobile app, integrates with other tools, and collects email addresses to start a chat.
There is a premium version available but the free option offers so many features, it’s unlikely that this will be necessary.
ChatBot
ChatBot is a good choice if you’re wanting to provide 24/7 support through the use of bots. This is a little complicated to set up as it involves programming the bots to respond to requests accurately.
However, this is one of the easiest plugins to use if looking to have bots as well as chat agents.
There are templates to use for different industries and you can customize these with conversations to meet your customers’ specific needs.
ChatBot also makes it easy for prospects to request to talk to a real person. It integrates well with both WordPress and WooCommerce.
MyLiveChat
This is another great free option. MyLiveChat is easy to set up and allows you to manage as many chats as you need at once.
This live chat plugin will also ask for an email address to initiate chat. It’s great for lead nurturing through email campaigns. It also has features that allow chat transcripts to be emailed to the prospect.
A paid plan is available which allows you to remove the MyLiveChat branding and have multiple agents interacting with prospects, among other things.
These are just some of the many options available. The plugin you end up choosing will be based on your own business needs and your website CMS.
Take time to explore the options on the market and talk to your web developer about the best live chat plugin for your website.
In Conclusion
Live chat is indispensable for your online business. Responding to your prospects as soon as possible is a main component of getting a high rate of conversions.
Having live chat allows for your prospects to ask questions 24/7. If you incorporate bot responses into your strategy, then you can help your prospects get all the information they need, at any time of the day, to help them make an informed purchase decision.
If you want to add live chat to your website but aren’t sure how to do so effectively, we can help.
Brand Hause can additionally help with web design and search engine optimization to make your website the best resource possible for your clients.
Contact us here for a free web design consultation to understand how we can help you!
Business growth starts with customer experience. As your strategic marketing partner, Brand Hause can help you rethink and refine the customer journey.
