5 Reasons to Add Live Chat to Your Customer Experience Strategy
In today’s social media and texting culture, the connection between customer and business is changing. The way customers want to interact with a business regarding their problems, and how fast they want them solved, also plays a role in the channel they use to contact support. In order to offer a high-level customer experience, offering a variety methods of handling customer complaints is essential.
And based on the stats of only 6% of millennials wanting to call a company for customer service, we know it’s time to evolve.
Need some customer experience statistics to back up the claim for needing to ads live chat to our CX strategy? Don’t worry, we got you!
53% of customers would prefer to use web chat before contacting a company for support. (ICMI)
Of those who prefer live chat, 79% said they did so because they get their questions answered quickly, 51% did so because they could multi-task, and 46% agreed it was the most efficient communication method (ICMI)
79% of businesses said that implementing live chat resulted in increased customer loyalty, sales and revenue (SuperOffice)
Live chat has the second-highest customer satisfaction (CSAT) ratings at 85%, just behind phone support at 91% (ZenDesk)
30% of companies who've been using live chat for less than 1 year claim to have seen a 5-10% increase or more in their revenue due to live chat (Zoho)
Live chat can assist at any stage of the customer journey
Customer journey mapping and understanding how your customers engage with your brand is important for premium CX. We’ve found that adding live chat to all stages of your customer experience helps customers when they need your assistance the most. Whether a potential customer starts a web chat to fill out a form to receive a free downloadable guide or reaches out during the final purchase stage, you’ll be able to get them information quickly and efficiently.
Live chat assists phone efforts
I remember when I had to make a customer support call and immediately dreaded that elevator music playing in the background. That all-too-familiar sound is never music to anyone’s ears. Then, an automated recording came on the line to indicate how long the wait time for the phone would be, but if I wanted to chat with a customer service rep, they could help me immediately.
Excited to skip the line, I opted in. They texted me a unique link that directed me to a live chat where the customer support agent immediately knew why I was contacting them. The issue was solved in a couple of chats back and forth and I was left feeling pleased with the interaction.This seamless combination of phone support and live chat is a feature that can shorten hold times by getting people with quick or minor questions off the line and into a chat to quickly assist them. And by integrating the information already in the phone call, the customer doesn’t need to hesitate moving over to chat in fear of having to restate their problem.
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Live chat allows your customer service team to be more productive
One of the greatest things about live chat is the number of conversations your live agents can engage in at once compared to phone support. Depending on the service level needed to answer customer inquiries, a service agent can assist anywhere between two and five customers via live chat at once. So, just doing this simple math, incorporating web chat into your CX strategy can help you assist up to five times more customers!
Enabling hotkeys or a quick response guide for frequently asked questions enables your agents with the tools to assist customers quickly and efficiently to be able to handle the next person in the queue.
Live chat doesn’t only allow for increased chat productivity--it helps open up phone lines for more in-depth customer service calls. Therefore, more access points to your customer support team are opened to help more customers all around!
Related Post: How to Give Customer Support a Human Touch
Live chat is convenient for customers
Our busy and multi-tasking culture means that people also want their problems solved conveniently and in a way that fits in with what they’re already doing. Over half of consumers note that they prefer live chat when they contact support because it allows them to multi-task. A customer can easily have chat support open in one internet tab or window and another task also running to accomplish two things at once. And when their question can get answered almost immediately, their satisfaction in the exchange only increases.
Live chat increases your conversion rate
When a customer is in the middle of a purchase, answering their question is proven to increase conversion rate. This report states that 44% of consumers say that having their questions answered via chat in the middle of shopping online increase conversion and checkout rates. And when 77% of consumers state that they won’t make a purchase if live chat support is not an option, why wouldn’t businesses consider adding live chat into their conversational marketing strategy?Adding live chat to your user experience helps answer time sensitive questions when the customer is ready to buy. This, in turn, will help them purchase in the moment and prevent cart abandonment, which could lead to them forgetting about completing the purchase altogether.
ABOUT INCEPT
Incept is an outsourced call center service that brings true conversational marketing back to customer experience. Our team of customer service representatives and experts partner with your team to improve the outcome of customer interactions and satisfaction, promote and protect your brand, and accelerate growth.
We’ve worked with some of the largest brands in the world to develop CX campaigns with one main goal - strengthen relationships at every touch point. From inbound phone calls and technical support, to organic and paid social media campaigns, to live chat, Incept is one of the best call center outsourcing vendors to assist all your CX and lead generation needs.