Live chat is an excellent tool in marketing that has been successfully assisting businesses and supporting customers for years. Its main purpose is typically associated with a real-time communication on particular matters and concerns that finds a win-win solution and ensures a good relationship between both parties. How important and effective is live chat? Find out this and much more with our guide.
What is live chat in marketing?
To put it very simply, live chat has to do with a speedy digital channel that lets you have real-time conversations and surprise people with perfect customer service.
When people browse your website online it is often a problem for many to navigate and find everything themselves. Live chat is a great solution to help them synchronically get their questions answered and successfully have their purchase made.
Amazing fact is that, both a customer and a company’s agent can initiate this type of chat depending on the goals they are trying to pursue. So, just by clicking on one button you have a live agent appearing on your screen and providing you with support. Doesn’t it sound like something cool and innovative?
What are the benefits of live chat?
You shouldn’t be a professional brand or digital marketing enthusiast to understand how live chat helps you boost sales, grow clients base or improve conversion rates. However, there are several dimensions supported by live chats that are rarely discussed as benefits. Let’s see which ones:
1. Communication 24/7
All customers value a website with the service working around the clock and the team ready to help at any time. Many companies set it and forget it rather being focused on their working hours and duties limited along with them. However, a typical client expects to get instant feedback if he or she is about to order your product/ service or, maybe, has already purchased one. That’s why set a live chat widget on your main website’s page and connect with your customers day-and-night.
2. Increased trust and loyalty
Not surprising fact is that live chat can holistically sustain or even improve the senses of conviction and reliability. As a rule of thumb, the customer’s inner voice will always raise some doubts concerning price, quality, shipment, etc. Therefore, inviting your client base to live chat is a must. Encourage them with a phrase similar to “Welcome! How can we help you?” or “Hey. Tell us what you are searching for?”. It will become a real ice breaker in the first few seconds of visit. So, you need to take your chance right from here.
3. Activity tracking
A wide range of live chat services allows you to monitor your viewers’ activity and cost efficiency. Besides that, you can measure all data up and collect it in one place, because everything will be automatically reflected in an ongoing chat. In a glimpse of several minutes that a viewer spends on your website, you will be able to see how active or passive they are. Also, you will get the opportunity to check the customers’ availability in the chat and their respective engagement daily, weekly, or monthly.
4. Efficient support team management
Live chat also offers a control of your support staff with just a mere click. You can conduct a little survey on your salespeople’s performance in a month, let’s say. You can evaluate how easily accessible and reasonably competent your team is. You can do all sorts of things, actually. By taking all the results from live chats into a consideration, you will know how to enhance productivity and kick-start a new more effective strategy.
5. Weak points discovery
Live chats open the door for problem-spotting and troubleshooting. If you work as a sales agent or content creator, you definitely know how crucial it is to define a customer’s weak point, stop at the gates and find the way to get around it. Usually, the common issue is a client sitting on the fence and doubting about a purchase. With the advanced live chat features you can strike up a powerful connection between you and a customer, helping him/ her to finally set up their mind about a product/ service.
6. Increased satisfaction levels
Not only do we have an increased order value but also satisfaction levels. When it comes to customer’s preferences, of course, they favour a real-time interaction the most. Thus, if you conduct live chat, be certain you are already halfway closer to equalizing their expectations and reality. This helpful invention ensures that everything is performed quickly and attentively. No messages missed, no calls declined.
7. Greater competitiveness
The response times it takes any company to answer varies from 5 minutes to 48 hours. Can you imagine how it goes both ways? What is your impression when you get feedback of your inquiries in a blink of an eye or in a coon’s age? Surely, the first option sounds more pleasant. And that is exactly what we can get by streaming live chats. Many organizations lose their leads when they decide to ignore the advantage of this marketing gem. But, you don’t want to enter this category, do you?
8. Flexible flow of communication
Multi-tasking is a real benefit of live chats, since they provide your clients with a nearly instant response, as well as your consultant with a quickly resolved problem. For example, if any confusion regarding services or products shows up, the team workers organizing live chats share their immediate view on it. Hands down, it is super convenient and versatile for each party participating in this little form of interaction.
9. No redundant information left
Unlike messaging that a person keeps seeing on the screen, live chat does not leave any information left after the session is over. It forces customers to ask the most reasonable questions and memorize conversation history not on a mobile device but in their heads. Actually, it is nothing more than just a good example of how human nature works. When you realize something is about to be unavailable very soon, you will immediately rush to gain the most of this something until it disappears.
10. No more long queues
No matter if we discuss online or offline services, long waiting queues never sound pleasant for anyone. And, once again it is a win-win benefit ensuring high-quality and quick response from your management department to customers one way or another. To save everyone’s precious time we just send a message in chat and wait a couple of seconds for a consultant to answer.
How to design live chat for your e-commerce or online store?
If you are a bit hesitant or unsure how to design an ideal live chat strategy, you should wonder no more! The idea behind live chats is not that hard to grasp however the immense contribution it brings to your product/project/business development is very precious. So, what are the key hacks for effective live chat management? Let’s find out together!
1. Gather information
If one of your marketing aims is to provide a more personalized customer session, you should start welcoming the audience with live chats. Place yourself in client’s shoes and imagine what your typical personalized experience is like. Do you instantly make a purchase when you visit some random service? Do you contemptuously get the urge to order items the features of which you are not even aware of? Do you spontaneously decide to engage in communication with some poorly interactive website?
Now, having answered them you should develop the most crucial idea – by understanding customers’ preferences and expectations, you can get more insight on how to develop online customer support channels. That’s why you need to collect as much data about your prospective client group as possible. How can you do that? Ask for their contact info, make a questionnaire. After a certain point of time make a little follow-up and ask for some more details again. Then, you will have less things on your plate and, instead, more time and money saved.
2. Create automatic conversations
According to Forrester, 60% of clients seek the answers using web self-service. Therefore, an ideal way to consult your customers and deploy expertise support from the team is through live chats. By understanding how to create the basic list of probable questions and answers with redirecting respective links, you will ensure a dynamic interaction among every actor in your business game. What can be more satisfying than the standard information clarified within a few minutes of your user experience? If a client gets integrated with your product or service out of your consultation time, it is a benefit for both of you.
But how can you identify these common questions, concerns a typical viewer might ask? How can you present the answer in the most appropriate and least intrusive way? The most obvious option is customer writing service reviews where the top rated writers are doing the real piece of their work. Check Writing Judge to ensure your written feedback on live chat matches people’s interest and notifies them with all up-to-date news of your company.
3. Send product recommendations
When we strike up a conversation with our potential customers, we are too afraid of their rejecting behavior to instantly accept our offers. However, there is nothing bad about consulting clients and presenting them with clear-cut decisions in a form of your service/ product. So, if you are already very determined to apply live chat in your marketing strategy, it is high time you made algorithms and mechanisms.
Typically, people are very skeptical about online goods or services, because they lack this internal conviction that human nature craves to see. But, as soon as you organize live chat, their mindset will be shifted. Moreover, in such a way that you want it to be shaped. For example, your salesperson has created a reliable atmosphere during the conversation by handling the customer’s requests and answering some urgent questions. Now, a real promotion machine can be set in force. It is only your consultants responsibility to choose the available recommended product and give clients a hard sell. And you are all done.
4. Choose the right place for a live chat window
When you are done with anticipating the questions and corresponding answers, it is time to set a visual image of these live chats up. Think what way would be the most better-looking and presentable. Identify a spot on your website page addressing the link to live chat. It is very easy to rock the boat here and choose the wrong place where a chaat proposal will be popping up. So, make sure you get help from visual directors/ merchandisers or anyone who could demonstrate you an independent view on this matter.
And with this particular hack it is also important to choose the right time, not only place. As a fact, the greatest time of users’ activity starts after a few hours when a typical working day ends. Many customers have almost the same time point that they can devote to looking over the site and messaging their requests. Consequently, a piece of decent advice on how to proactively sort the customers’ issues out would be to strategically post live chat.
5. Consolidate your training approach
Regardless of your ambitious goals to win the customer’s trust and loyalty via live chat, you can not always focus on them. Like in any corporation supplied with a bundle of workers, there is a need to define staffing requirements and duties. By adding live chat as a significant tool of your marketing strategy, you will simultaneously have to draft your crew’s training plan. Please, don’t underestimate the necessity to hire and train the best individual agents who will constitute a growing prosperity and success of your business.
Make sure to do the research inside your team. It will help you determine a scale of work and money everyone should either give or get. Therefore, before reaching out to your prospective clients and strightly jumping in live chats, consciously examine your folks and identify, at least for yourself, what improvement should take place first.
6. Build a long-term relationship
Imagine this. You begin to deal with your new incoming clients with the assistance of live chat. What advantages might you instantly obtain if we are to refer to your competitiveness in the market? On one side, you become an outstandingly renowned brand or organization that enormously differs from its concurring counteragents, because you are the one out of thousands who has one more card up your sleeve. On the other side your audience tends to be less distrustful, closed-off and skeptical about you, but much more loyal and open-minded.
The bottom line here is that live chat builds a strong long-term bond between you and your viewers, that is almost impossible to tear apart. It becomes unreal for clients to switch to another service or give a preference to another brand, when they experience enjoyable and informative live chats with you.
7. Use the human psychology
Keep in mind that nobody gets a pleasure to chat with artificially intelligent machines. Call-centred marketing with machineries maintaining the discussions is neither acceptable nor effective anymore. The main point is to personalize your communication with customers and make it feel less digital or commercial-focused. Like anywhere in marketing, it is always about communication that drives a certain level or conviction or encouragement. So, live chats should be exclusively followed with the implications of individualistic approach.
For instance, use the words in your chat attentively and make sure you don’t overload the audience with incomprehensive facts and data. Conduct live chats in a simple introductory way even if it is not the first time you pitch it. In order to create a more relaxed conversation you can always use some slang terms or industrial jokes. This is something they would never have expected to observe in a chat with a robot.
Sum up
All in all, live chat becomes a real bonus for those businesses that have discovered it earlier and used in their marketing development plans. But, if you are just setting your foot on this track now, it is not too late.
Do you need to present a visually impressive image of your brand? Do you want to keep a record on your customer service support agents? Do you want to increase your sales and generate leads? Do you want to fasten your response time rate? Everybody wants to. Luckily for you, we shared the main tricks on how to set live chat in work right and efficiently, so that you can achieve all of these goals at once.
In general, you have everything to get it started, there are no more steps back. Make a brief draft depicting your vision of live chat design, content and timeline of the messaging session. These will be the first major steps forward. Then, when you know an approximate timeline and a number of people needed, you will become a real master of digital marketing.
