Have you considered adding live chat to your website? Live chat is a great way to provide convenient customer support to your customers. And consumers love using live chat to contact businesses. In fact, according to a study from TechJury, live chat has overtaken other options as the most preferred channel for customer communication.
But not only is it useful for helping your customers get their issues solved in a timely manner, live chat can also increase your conversions. As stated by Intercom, website visitors are 82% more likely to convert to customers if they’ve chatted with you first.
If you want to generate more sales using live chat though, there are a few important things to keep in mind in order to succeed.
Here’s how to increase conversions with live chat.
Train Your Chat Support Team
Of course, if you want your live chat strategy to be effective, you need to provide the best customer support. But, if you want to increase conversions with live chat, your chat support team needs to be trained not only to solve customer problems, but also to provide valuable suggestions and information to website visitors.
Many people will come to your website wanting to learn more about your product/service before taking out their credit card. So, you need to train your team to guide those website visitors to the information they’re looking for — or even better, ease their concerns right inside the chat.
Your chat support agents should spend some time learning about your website visitors’ goals and pain points in order to provide the best suggestions and encourage them to make a purchase that’s right for them.
You also need to teach your team how to properly speak in a semi-formal voice in live chat and use language that your website visitors will understand — so get rid of that company jargon.
A friendly, helpful experience with your live chat agents is something your website visitors will appreciate and remember.
Be Available 24/7/365
Consumers today aren’t as patient as they used to be. If they don’t get an answer from one company, they can easily move onto another company that will respond immediately. If that happens to your company, you’ve just missed out on an opportunity to turn that person into a customer.
As you can see, it’s important that your company is available through your live chat 24/7/365 so you don’t miss out on any opportunities to make a sale.
But, if you’re a 1-person business, being available 24/7 is nearly impossible. And hiring a ton of new live chat agents is expensive.
Luckily, you have the option of outsourcing your live chat.
For example, with a service like LTVplus, they provide you with highly-trained customer success representatives for SaaS and eCommerce businesses that can handle your live chat in any time zone and language.
Alternatively, you can also use a chatbot. Chatbots use artificial intelligence to simulate conversations with human users and they’re extremely useful for providing automated support to your website visitors at all hours of the day and night.
Plus, there are a number of WordPress plugins and apps that allow you to easily add a chatbot to your website without having to touch a line of code.
Put a Human Face to the Chat
People want to know that they’re talking to a real person and not a robot. In fact, according to 99Firms, 70% of consumers prefer human agents to AI technologies. So, be sure to let your website visitors know they’re talking to a real person by putting a human face to your live chat.
Most of the best live chat software plugins allow you to add a profile photo, name, and title to a live chat window, like in the example below.
Using a real image of the live chat agent will help your website visitors better connect with them. After all, most people are more likely to take advice from a fellow human rather than a robot.
Don’t Forget to Upsell
Once you’ve mastered the art of providing valuable customer service via your live chat, you can also use your live chat to upsell and cross-sell. But, you have to do it the right way.
First, you have to do it in the right circumstances. You don’t want to scare potential customers away by upselling too soon and you don’t want to upsell at the end of a conversation with a frustrated or difficult customer, it will only upset them more.
Determine the needs of the customer and pay close attention to their tone to decide if it’s the best time for upselling.
For instance, take a look at this example from Asos. The shopper asked the company for recommendations of articles of clothing that would pair well with a denim shirt, providing the company with the perfect opportunity to suggest other items from their online store.
Choose the right time to upsell without being pushy and you’ll be able to generate more sales from your existing customers.
Follow-up After the Chat
After a live chat conversation has ended, your job isn’t over. Many people who visit your website and chat with your customer support agent, just aren’t ready to make a purchase yet — they might not be ready to make a purchase for months.
That’s why it’s important to follow-up with users after their initial conversation. Following-up with them will show people that your company cares and it’ll keep that potential purchase at the top of their minds.
A popular way to follow-up is by email. You can use an email marketing service to automatically send a follow-up email to a user that’s just had a conversation with one of your live chat agents.
Aside from following-up with potential customers, you should also follow-up with existing customers. Take the opportunity to send customers who used your live chat a customer satisfaction survey. This will allow you to improve your customer service skills as well as retain your customers.
Over to You
As you can see, adding a live chat feature to your website is not only useful to answer FAQs, it’s a powerful revenue-generating tool. But remember, increasing conversions through live chat takes time. Focus on providing excellent customer service first, then start implementing some of these tips. Over time you can expect to see a boost in sales thanks to live chat.
