Why Your Website NEEDS Live Chat

Everywhere you look you’ll find chat apps. WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Skype, you name it, there’s an app for it. Whereas once everybody communicated over the phone or via a standard text message, now we communicate by typing into our smartphones. You can ask an entire generation of people whether or not they would pick up the phone if somebody called them, and they will tell you no because they’d prefer to communicate via text. 

Not only is it more convenient to be able to communicate in your own time when you have a spare second, but it’s also convenient to ensure that you are communicating with evidence. Surprisingly, many businesses are still relying on telephone calls to be able to get the results that they want from their customers. Most people will see a business, ask them to call in to discuss something, and they will refuse to call in because people don’t want to call a business, they want to be able to text them or chat with them online. 

Having the best conversational user interface isn’t easy, however, and it’s up to you as a business owner to make sure that you are putting something customer-facing out there that just makes sense. If you are getting your customer numbers dwindling and you notice that things are changing that it may be due to the fact that you don’t yet have a live chat option on your website. If you don’t have one of these options, you’re already behind.Live chat is the way of the future.

There are so many advantages to having a live chat bot that leads to agents over having just the traditional customer service methods of people calling in and having to wait on hold. Most of the time, live chat bots can answer questions before agents need to, which saves everybody some time. So let’s take a look at the top reasons why your website needs a live chat.

1. Customers have a chance to multitask.

One of the worst parts about having to call a company is that you know you have to allocate hours of your time just to be able to speak to somebody. Being sat on hold, listening to music is not as fun as anybody thinks it would be. You have to wait on hold, listen to music, and you don’t have anything else to do. You also can’t do anything else because of the fact that you’re stuck on hold. Live chat functions allow customers to continue to work while they wait for a Rep to pick up the phone. They can read emails, read the news, travel on the public transport and get to a meeting if they want to. They know that they’ll hear an alert when a chat agent has logged into the conversation and is talking to them.

2. Customers prefer it.

If you don’t have to call into a business to speak to somebody on the phone and wait, then you won’t take that route. Most customers would much prefer to sit on a live chat and talk to somebody that way than they would on the phone. Talking on the phone is actually becoming rather outdated, especially with the surgeon text messaging apps. Of course it takes the emotion out of it, but at the same time people prefer this and then they can respond and speak in their own time rather than having to sit on hold. Young people really use the phone anymore due to the prevalence of scam callers. Texting and social media is where the conversations are. 

3. For the sake of efficiency.

While it may be easier at times for a customer service agent to talk a customer through a problem over the phone, it’s not particularly efficient. Agents can only talk to one person at a time on the phone, but with live chat, customer service reps have the opportunity to talk to multiple customers at once. This ensures that people feel like they are getting the right attention. Conversation while actually feeling as if they are important. All of your customers are important, but if you can save time and money by making sure that your customer agents can talk to more than one person at a time, why wouldn’t you go that route?

4. It’s the future.

Right now there are only really one or two generations that prefer to speak to a human being on the phone if they need to get a problem sorted. Most generational adults would prefer to speak to a chat first to see if they can get their answer before they speak to an agent.If you are not keeping an eye on the trends that could be happening, you’re going to be behind in your business. Yes, talking on the phone still does have a place, but there is going to come a time when your business is going to need a live chat. So why not jump on that bandwagon now so that you can be ahead of the curve?

5. You get chat logs.

Evidence is so important because anybody can say they had a conversation with you and then there’s no way of denying it. In writing, the conversation is backed up and saved with every chat already being recorded. Customers have the options of receiving their own transcript too, so that they have evidence of the conversations that have been had previously. Service reps could go back to chat logs too when having repeat customers. Rather than having a customer go back through the problem over and over again, chat reps can skim the chat log to see what was already covered and see if they can help in a new way.

6. It’s so much faster.

Live chat will almost always connect a customer with an agent faster than a phone system will. People also don’t have to go through annoying menus that are done by bots trying to get the answers to their questions or trying to get hold of somebody. With most live chat agents, people are able to speak to somebody pretty quickly and they’re able to get their questions answered. If they can’t get hold of a person, the live chat agent is able to help further what a bot can do.

7. It can be much cheaper.

When customers call premium phone numbers, they often have to sit on hold for ages. This runs up the phone bill and then what happens is they can’t be bothered to get through to that company and they don’t get their problem solved. If you’re a business who wants to solve a customer’s problem, then you need to give them more than one option to do so. Most people have a limited amount of minutes on a phone plan and having to wait on hold for a long period can cost them a lot of money. When customers can have their problem solved relatively quickly without even using their phone, it really can go a long way to help to build that rapport you’re trying to build. 

8. You can offer so many more customer service hours.

Unless you have a business model where you have live chat agents sitting and waiting for calls around the clock on shifts. Then you need an option, a way to get through to customers without having to be constantly online. A lot of customer service centers closed down at a certain point in the evening, especially on weekends, and live chat allows you to be able to continue to answer customer questions without having to have an entire workforce of people behind it. Sure, you may have a skeleton staff, but your business can afford to have a skeleton staff that are answering the most urgent questions that a chat bot or an FAQ section cannot answer.

9. You can gather essential data.

It’s so important for your business to be able to target the right demographic, and one huge advantage of a live chat is that all data is preserved. You can track the link that refers people to your site, the operating systems the customers are using, whether the customer has just come online or whether they are active or idle during the chat. Things like these can really matter to your business and it will really help you to understand whether or not your business is able to deliver the answers that customers want because you get to keep hold of the transcripts of every single conversation. You can also run software to pull out identify keywords. These are the ones that can show you where the problems are and what type of customers are encountering those problems. These are the solutions that can work the best, and once you have this data, you can make better, more intelligent choices.

10. Solve problems far faster.

Many customers need help with the same problems over and over again. Of course, you need a permanent workaround for any problems that are coming up on repeat, but in the meantime, there are things that you could be doing on your live chat to ensure that these problems aren’t happening for customers as often. Well prepared chat agents can direct customers immediately to the most useful answers to their questions or to a knowledge base without them having to hunt through your website and giving up halfway through. It’s so important that you need to learn how to pinpoint the gaps in your service and navigational problems in your online support content. When you have a live chat, you’ll be able to seamlessly close some of these gaps and help your customers in the best possible way. 

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