Over the years, the field of digital marketing has witnessed a number of innovations. Quite a number of techniques have been employed with the goal of marketing a brand and driving more traffic to a page. Be it customer driven contests or video marketing, the sole purpose of any marketing campaign is to increase the rate of conversion. Among the various techniques, live chat offers a convenient way to connect with potential customers when used effectively.
There exists immense potential in a live chat software. The fact that live chat offers the option to connect directly with customers makes it a powerful tool. It opens the possibility to build a direct connection with customers. With live chat, customers are able to directly reach out to the customer service with their queries. This makes the purchase experience much smoother and customers definitely become biased towards your brand.
However, to make the best use of the untapped potential in live chat, you need to use it correctly. A lot of businesses make use of live chat but are not able to reap positive results due to poor implementation. In fact, if employed properly, live chat can be a game changer. However, since it is a new tool, most businesses are not aware of the techniques that will enable them to make the best use of it. With proper implementation, you can enhance sales by almost 45% with live chat.
Listed below are a few tricks that will help you make the best use of live chat. However, before we explore them, let us understand why exactly live chat is so important.
How live chat can help:
In the domain of marketing, it is essential to understand why exactly things work. This will equip you with the capacity to implement techniques in a more effective way.
Live chat make makes it extremely convenient for customers by offering immediate solutions to their queries. Live chat provides an instant platform where customers can chat with ease and with a degree of privacy. Before live chat, there were two ways to get in touch with a company:
- Phone
However, there is some amount of hesitation involved in calling, as people might not want personal information to be added to some e-mail list. Besides, phone calls can be annoying with automated prompts. This takes a lot of time too. Moreover, quite a number of people just don’t prefer talking over the phone.
An email is a great option but most businesses take some time to get back to people.
This implies that neither of the two methods will help if a person is looking for more information about a particular product. This gap can be filled by using a live chat. Instead of dialling a number or composing an email, you can type your query and get an instant reply. This makes the process much convenient and smoother.
The fact that live chat has positively helped in boosting sales is backed by substantial evidence. Some of the reasons why live chat is preferred by customers include:
Live chat is convenient to use:
Live chat offers the easiest channel to learn more about a particular product or service. Customers have their queries answered instantly and it is this convenience offered by live chat that makes it extremely popular. As many as about 79% of the people make use of live chat. Another advantage offered by live chat is that it allows you to multitask. This is one major reason why people prefer to use this tool. You no longer need to stop to write an email or make a call to get clarity or information about a product.
Live chat makes the process of decision making easier:
Customers who make use of live chat are either in the process of buying the product or planning to buy it. This is a critical phase and connecting with the customers at this point can be immensely helpful. A report by Forrester Research indicates that about 44% of online customers feel that having their questions answered through live chat during a purchase is one of the essential features of a website. The simple move of a question being answered can make a huge difference between a sale and bounce.
Live chat enhances customer satisfaction:
The fact that customers have their queries answered quickly and easily make their experience through the website a smoother one. This helps to build a positive image for the brand. People like the ability to communicate instantly without having to wait. If your customers can get instant help, your conversion can increase by as much as 45%.
A white paper released by Digital marketing Depot indicates that live chat has the capacity to increase online leads by an average of 40%.
Let us explore some of the ways in which live chat can help you to
Use proactive chat:
Customers might not often initiate a conversation. The chat box itself can be used to connect and encourage people to put forward their queries. The content that you include in your chat box is crucial in this regard. The chat box can serve the following functions:
- Platform for live chat
- An ad or a pop-up
Adding a copy that not only offers help but also promises a great offer can encourage people to connect and go ahead with the purchase. The tone and language used can play a significant role here. You can even encourage people to introduce themselves. This might make your potential customers feel welcomed and sets a positive impression for your brand.
Training the chat support team:
The chat support team will play a vital role in helping you make the best use of the live chat system. This makes it necessary to extend quality training to them and equip them with the right skills. This will enable them to extend a smooth service. In fact, this is one aspect about live chat that is often ignored by most businesses. You need to bear in mind that your customers will not remember the chat software but the interaction they had with the support team.
Moreover, the fact that live chat is a comparatively a new field makes training all the more essential. Sales people are found to do better than customer service representatives. You also need to ensure that your representatives are able to converse in the language of the customer. Representatives also need to be able to understand and identify the manner in which customers are speaking and accordingly speak to them. The tone and language used has to be professional and friendly. Your customers will mostly talk in a relaxed tone and you need to follow the same. Again, if you notice that your customer is formal, you need to maintain the same tone. Avoid the use of jargons that your customers might not be aware of. In fact your customer might know very little about your brand and products.
Create a Chat Protocol:
A lot goes into developing an effective live chat system. You need to create a protocol, follow and modify it as and when required. The following steps will help you create an efficient chat protocol.
Friendly Greetings:
The ‘greetings’ that you create comprise automatic chat box pop-ups. There are chat providers that offer multiple options. Example: For a first-time visitor, you can make the chat box to pop-up. You can also make it pop-up after a certain point of time. You can use different types of sentences to begin the chat.
Create Templates:
Templates can be immensely useful in the process of live chat. However, you need to keep in mind that they might not always work. You can have a comprehensive list of FAQ’s prepared with answers. You can even use a document and paste the answers. However, the prepared answers might need a modification based on the precise requirement of the customers. You will just need to change a few words to customize answers, but this can make a huge difference. Make sure that it does not become obvious. If customers are able to sense that a template is being used, it might turn them off.
Proactive Actions:
Live chat can be used in various ways to fulfill your goal of connecting with your potential customers. To be a live chat salesperson is a challenging task as your style and tone can have an immense aspect. After all, you don’t want to make your goal to sell the product extremely obvious to your customers. Again, you don’t want to miss out the opportunity to get contact information of potential customers. This makes it necessary to carry the conversation in a manner that can help you make the most of your interaction.
You can try to get the email ids of customers as it is a useful medium to provide information. In fact, you can prepare a list of opportunities that you can avail to get contact details of customers. You can ask for contact details in the following situations:
- When customers ask about pricing plans
- Looking for custom solutions
- Ask for detailed information about the products and services
- Are unsure but express desire to keep in touch
By having a systematic protocol in place, you are prepared to face any situation. This simplifies the process for you. In fact successful live chat is largely dependent on having an efficient protocol system in place. This is how most companies work and has been able to yield successful results from live chat. You need to develop your live chat system into one that is recognized by people and offers smooth solution. This will also help to set your business apart from that of others.
Quite a number of people are hesitant to use live chat since they feel that it is a complicated process. However, the fact that live chat can reduce your support costs by almost half and increase conversion rate by almost half, encourages people to incorporate live chat systems. Live chat offers innumerable benefits if implemented in the right manner. Businesses that are unable to draw benefits from live chat system are probably using it the wrong way. Their system is robotic. Live chat makes sense and gives results only if you have real and responsive humans with customised answers. That is exactly what people are looking for.
Live chat can be used effectively for all businesses. In fact it is ideal for all types of online business that require some form of customer interaction.
If you are considering the idea of a live chat but are confused, the following questions can help you figure out the right answer.
- Do you sell your products online?
- Does your business need a customer service team?
- Does your sales or customer service team interact with customers on a regular basis through different channels?
If the answer to the above questions is a ‘yes’, it implies that live chat can help your business. If you intend to enhance conversations with customers and build personal connections, you should definitely opt for live chat.
