The role of live chat in customer engagement has evolved from being merely about troubleshooting to preempting the customer’s needs and proactively addressing them. In fact, live chat software can safely be considered as the most underrated element in your digital marketing campaign success. Consider the following statistics:

  • Wide-ranging business benefits: As per research by Kayako, “79% of businesses said that implementing live chat resulted in increased customer loyalty, sales and revenue.”
  • Widespread customer acceptance: The GoSquared statistics suggests that “52% of consumers are more likely to repurchase from a company that offers live chat support.”

Clearly, implementing a robust live chat software has consumer-driven and business-oriented benefits – from providing round-the-clock customer support and to assist your sales and marketing teams. Let’s look at these benefits in greater detail below.

 

1. It Offers a Speedy & Seamless Customer Experience

Live chat is a smart and intuitive tool that’s increasingly being used to simulate human-like conversations and provide customized experience 24/7. One of the reasons why live chat can assist in sales and customer support is because it can automate routine parts of the process and help connect with website visitors, qualify leads, and support customers in real-time, that too, all from a centralized dashboard.

Take the following example for consideration:

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Key takeaway: Live chat acts as an all-in-one tool that allows you to analyze past communication, purchase behavior, and user preferences to help deliver personalized experiences 24/7. This enhances the customer experience and builds customer loyalty.

 

2. It Helps Shorten the Sales Cycle & Drive a Friction-less Experience

Often times, customers are seen getting stuck on certain pages of a company’s website – this could be the payment page or the pricing page, for example. They may have queries about your pricing model plans or about how to make payments via the methods available.

In such a scenario, live chat software can proactively reach out to a customer and offer helpful prompts to the user, asking them if they need any help:

Key takeaway: Proactive outreach and seamless customer experience are the biggest advantages of using live chat software. It makes the customers feel important while guiding them – and shortening – the sale cycle by preempting their needs and offering appropriate solutions.

 

3. It Helps Automate Routine Tasks & Takes Off the Workload

For the longest time, the best use-case of the live chat was considered to be its ability to answer routine, FAQ-type questions and automate simple tasks. And rightly so. However, today’s live chat softwares are more dynamic in nature, offering high-functioning advantages such as the ability to analyze your chat performance, personalize the messages, view customer communication history, among others. Take for instance Acquire’s live chat software which helps create seamless in-person customer support and sales experience by allowing users to launch a video chat with just one click from your live chat widget:

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Key takeaway: Live chat softwares are continuously evolving to offer high-quality support. Plus, it can offer instant support to multiple users at once and take off your team’s workload. This allows your company to scale its customer support efforts while providing customized service.

 

4. It Allows Customers to Self-Serve & Save their Valuable Time

According to The State of Global Customer Service Report, “66% of customers try to use self-service first.” This makes sense because no one likes to wait for help if they can solve the problem at hand by themselves.

This is where live chat acts as a handy self-service tool. It offers 24×7 assistance and instant support. Plus, as compared to human agents, live chat does not take coffee breaks or vacation leaves. What’s more, companies can integrate a useful knowledge base into their live chat support so that the user can click on it and be directed to the help portal within seconds:

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Key takeaway: Live chat is a preferred communication tool for customers due to its ability to offer instant and speedy support while empowering customers to self-serve. Best of all, it allows the brand to communicate with customers in ‘their’ own language – solving problems and providing a content-rich knowledge back which uses pictures, GIFs, and videos to make it more relatable.

 

Closing Thoughts

All things considered, live chat is the underdog of your digital marketing plan for all intents and purposes. In fact, it’s now long past being viewed as a boring, drab tool that communicates with users in a robot-like fashion. With the advent of technology, live chat is reinventing the way in which brands are interacting with customers and fostering deeper connections with the beauty of contextual and helpful ‘texts.’ In simple words, its true potential is yet to be utilized within your company’s digital marketing plan. What do you think?

 

 

 

Dhruv Mehta is a Digital Marketing Professional who works at Acquire and provides solutions in the digital era. In his free time, he loves to write on tech and marketing. He is a frequent contributor to Tweak Your Biz. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.