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10 Importance of Live Chat in Customer Support
Posted by ICCS BPO on Friday 17th of January 2020
A company’s success depends on how customers are treated. Word of mouth by satisfied customers plays a pivotal role in creating a good vibe for product or service by recommending the product/service to friends and family, and possibly become a permanent customer. A great customer support is required to convert this thought in reality.
Customer support is the base on which customers trust and loyalty is built, hence it is mandatory that company is focused on improving customer experience by incorporating features like live chat. Another eye opening fact is that over 60% of shoppers prefer using chat process for repeat orders. Following reasons will show the impact that live chat can have on upgrading customer support services:-
1. Immediate response
In today’s fast-paced world, where time is equated with money, people do not like to waste time waiting in IVR, instead prefer getting immediate response.
The most important characteristic of live chat is that it eliminates waiting time, listening to long and sometimes confusing IVR menus and instead they can directly speak to a live agent and can get their request processed.
2. Customer Centric
Customer may have queries during placing order or after placing order or post receiving order. If they aren’t sure about the purchase and they have no one to turn to for clarification of their doubts, they can easily drop the order and settle for competitor.
However, chat makes the process more convenient as they can turn to a live agent for any potential difficulties or questions.
This saves them from trouble of searching for frequently asked questions, to get response for their queries.
3. Elimination of Response Time
Statistics show that average wait time on social media is 10 hours and an email response takes longer than 12 hours. Usually people don’t even try to reach out to support service because of unnecessary wait time that’s involved in getting a customer response.
Live chat is a solution to stop loosing potential customers.
4. Competitive Advantage
Competition is an inevitable part in business world. It doesn’t matter whether it is a small scale entrepreneur, medium level or large level entrepreneur, they all give their best to stand out in business world of cut throat competition.
Real-time customer service can be a new way to stand out in crowd. The fact that a business provides live chat service, makes it more customer centric and attractive for customers.
5. Conversion Rate
Customer support agent can easily act as seller, who motivates/coaxes customer by sharing features of other available products/services.
Amanda Willis, head of the marketing department at The Word Point shared how live chat can also benefit marketing strategy: “Live chat software provides you with all the data and analytics about visitors’ patterns and behaviour. The collected information can then be analysed and used to improve further marketing efforts.” Live chat can easily be integrated with Google Analytics to make analysis of data more effective.
6. Adaptable
Customer issues do not necessarily get resolved by using FAQ’s and IVR’s and resolving any issue via email takes too much time, which is not available in today’s world, that is why live chat is most preferred option. Live chat adapts to customer’s issues, queries, and interests on real time basis.
Best way to make the most out of live chat is to train the agents to be competent to answer any type of questions. The customers will love the fact that they won’t be passed around multiple support channels.
7. Easy Accessibility
Chat is preferred by international companies and it is very cost effective in global world. There will be no need to set up customer support offices in various capitals and big cities. Chat feature enables the agents to interact with customers no matter where they are.
Simple access to internet and a few clicks on the website is all that is required to establish customer interaction.
8. Negation of Need for Multilingual Support Agents
A simple tool such as Google Translator allows agents to interact with customers in multiple languages. There are several software that make agents job a lot easier.
9. Cost-Effective
There is no need for spending money on equipment for phone support if chat feature is used by any call centre. A skilled chat support agent can interact with up to three customers simultaneously while the call centre operator can only help one customer at the time.
10. Customer Engagement
Human beings are social beings and offering robotic and generic answers will not be sufficient to build trust and faith in customers.
Nearly 73% of consumers claim that friendly customer support makes them fall in love with a company, whereas 52% have made more than one purchase from a company after they’ve experienced positive initial customer service experience.
Chat gives a human touch to customer support mixed with fast response, increased engagement, and a cost-effective approach that chat offers, your business will stand out among the competitors.