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Whether you’re an online business or a brick and mortar store, being able to provide great customer service is important to the success of your company. Help should never be hard to find for a customer; one way to make yourself easily and readily available is through live help software (also known as live support or live chat).
Live help is a software as a service that allows businesses to chat, in real-time, with customers who visit their website. Live support applications are commonly used to provide immediate customer service and information to potential customers.
Why is live chat important for websites?
People are busy! This includes your customers. When trying to get their questions answered, having a website with a live support system makes their lives easier; this is especially true when they’re at work. One in three Americans admit to shopping online while at work, not having enough time outside of work to shop is the top reason for their secret shopping.
It’s faster to chat with a person and get a question answered than it is to search the website for it. What if your site doesn’t have the information they’re looking for? Well, you’ve either lost a customer to a competitor that help, or they had the patience to call, navigate the call menu and then wait on-hold for an answer.
Live chats are the equivalent to on-demand customer support. This leads to higher customer satisfaction rates. Live help has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel at 73 percent, compared with 61 percent for email and 44 percent for phone. Not having a chat system in place is a customer service and business faux pas.
How much does each call cost your business? If you don’t know, you’re with the 25 percent of companies that do not know their ‘cost-per-call.’ Depending on your industry, calls can range from $3.50 up to $50 per call! Many call centers have found that live support can be up to 30 percent cheaper than phone calls, with the average cost of $1 to $5 per chat.
More reasons live support is cost effective:
Having a chat system eliminates the need for expensive equipment such as:
Live help on websites have shown to lead to higher conversion rates. In 2008, Wells Fargo leveraged online chat to drive sales, the results were high customer satisfaction scores and a double-digit increase in converted shoppers.
Chatting with your customers can make it easier to upsell without the negative feelings experienced on the phone or in person. You can easily link customers to similar products or services while answering their questions.
Having live help can reduce cart abandonment; 83 percent of customers who left, after adding items to a cart, claimed it was because they didn’t get the help they needed or couldn’t find an answer to their question on the website. Potential customers don’t want to wait for you to answer the phone or reply to their email. They know they can probably find the product somewhere else. If you’re not able to point them in the right direction immediately, then you may just end up losing a customer to a competitor.
Live help should be added to your customer service toolbox. At a glance, it may seem like live chats offer no advantage over traditional resources such as FAQs, hotlines or contact forms. But customers find a live help option to be the more satisfying option when getting help with a specific question or issue. Don’t underestimate live chat in the sales pipeline.
Over 40 percent of online customers say that having questions answered by a live person, while in the middle of an online purchase, is one of the most important features a website can offer. Customers want features that only live help offers!
It was found that 60 percent of customers would rather be helped through chat over any other methods. A major finding was that 56 percent of respondents from ages 18 to 34 prefer live support, rather than calling in.
Live help is becoming one of the most important tools for customer service. It helps throughout the entire buyer’s journey, from first contact to support after a sale. Live help is a tool that shouldn’t be over-looked because it offers instant help with minimal effort.
Having the ability to email customers their chat transcripts can save you time and money by helping reduce the amount of ‘call backs.’ If a customer forgot the answer to their question, they can simply re-read their transcription via email.
Live help gives customers, that normally would bounce off your page, an opportunity to ask a question. This is powerful insight into finding out if your website is missing important information that will help with a conversion. It’s also helpful with your content marketing strategy. Customer questions can be topics for blog posts! Live support gives you a chance to learn about your customer’s pain points that you may have missed, so you can create new content and drive more traffic.
Live Help is important to a business because it:
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