Digital marketing is getting trickier every day. The rules keep changing and so do the challenges that online businesses face.
The best way to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the market at every stage of business maturity is to react, reflect, reset and refresh.
Drill down your conversion rates by better understanding the people that come to your website. Gain insights and a fresh perspective by chatting with them in the moment as they browse. Leverage automation paired with human interaction to get below the surface and uncover their true desires.
How do you do this? With live chat.
The demand for live chat is growing incredibly and if you haven’t come to the party yet, now might be the time to get started.
The benefits of live chat
The following image indicates that response time and convenience are the top reason to use live chat.
Here are numerous other benefits of live chat software:
- Reduce the cost of customer acquisition
- Generate high quality leads
- Increase sales
- Enhance customer service and loyalty
- Respond quickly with real-time assistance
- Direct connectivity with your customers
- Convenience of response-time
- Proactive outreach
The average satisfaction rate with the outcomes from live chat is 92%, especially with e-commerce businesses.
Being active 24/7
You can be active on social media with prospects but what happens when you have a visitor on your website? How do you connect with them? How can you solve their queries instantly?
A recent customer service benchmark report has indicated that although 80% of the companies believe that they offer excellent customer service, only 8% of prospects believe they received excellent customer service. That gap is huge! The hint here is it is critical to manage and respond instantly to customer queries and support by being active 24/7.
Live chat enables you to take the experiences of your customers at all touch points into account. If you don’t want to fall behind, make sure you respond to your visitors and customers instantly. Drive, qualify and close the deal via live chat.
The need to engage
Engaging with customers must be a business-wide undertaking. Look, listen; talk; engage.
Multiple platforms are there to manage user engagement. Yes, social media and advertising can help you get eyeballs. But to get that early win and encourage user engagement, you need a way to interact at the first point of contact with your business. Driving engagement on your website is an absolute necessity in this instance. Live chat helps you do this.
It helps you stay ahead of the curve and have more control over how you deliver your brand experience while engaging with prospects.
Customer-led growth
Brands need to keep customers around to generate long term growth. Customers help with innovation, re-engineer your functionality and improve performance. Better ideas emerge from customers.
Customers are like cogs that keep the wheels turning. It is critical to engage with them and listen to their desires, deliver the best experience and gain insights. Live chat lets you quantify and record every interaction. It has the capacity to build your brand and enhance your value to customers.
The traditional approach is frustrating
If your goal is to grow, then you are measuring performance based on new customer acquisition, customer satisfaction, and retention.
Customer service and the interactions you have with your customers play a significant role in achieving each of these outcomes. Traditional approaches to customer service are frustrating your customers. Phone calls to outsourced service teams, and long periods of time left on hold without getting an answer to a question. Even customer service emails tend to fall flat with response-hungry consumers.
Customers want an answer and they want it yesterday. Live chat enables you to engage with the customer at the exact moment they have an issue, get them a response, and move the relationship forward.
Online live chat tools are here to help you engage and connect with your customers instantly thereby reducing the wait time.
Getting started with live chat
From a simple customer support tool, live chat has come a long way. With AI leading the way, this technology is getting better and more intuitive.
Interacting directly with visitors on websites is becoming much easier. It is based on the client-server model. The Global Live Chat Software Market size is predicted to touch $987.3 million by 2023 with several players thriving in the market. These live chat software are capable of handling live support, help desk and even analytics.
As well, live chat social media plugins are proving to be a great way to chat in real-time within social media pages, from email or a CRM software.
Engaging with users, supporting them instantly, and converting them into customers is much easier with live chat social media plugins.
Artificial intelligent chatbots are also prominent in online business engagement and live chat software. The global chatbot market is expected to touch $800 million by the end of 2022. This new age approach to live chat is capable of working on multiple platforms and his a huge time-saver for startups and low-resource companies.
“This unlocks a new era of personalization wherein our devices become trusted partners, concierges, media curators – maybe even friends?” (VentureBeat)
AI Chatbots are capable of driving customer engagement, personalizing the customer experience, and saving time for users.
To wrap
Expectations for real-time connectivity are growing fast.
Along with this, rises the expectation of customer service and customer relationship management.
With all innovative possibilities, customer experience unfolds in real-time across multiple devices and via multiple platforms covering the entire process right from the first touch point till a conversion.
Delivering excellent service is not rocket science. But, delivering service instantly by reducing slow response time is the only way to create a better customer experience.
Instant response and gratification are in high demand from users in this automated age. One of the low friction methodologies getting attention currently is live chat software. Give it go!
Guest Author: Meenakshi is currently working on global mobile app technologies reporting on diverse subjects for Openxcell. Prior to this, she was working for a technology marketing company based in Norwalk as content contributor.