Advantages of Using Live Chat for Customer Service

These days, when customers regard entirely digital interactions with brands as a norm rather than a curiosity, it is easy for a company to neglect the importance of simple human connection. However, the brands that make such a mistake are at high risk of distancing themselves from their customers, which can potentially result in waning brand loyalty and decreased frequency of interactions with the brand.

In our digital era, customers still expect company reps to conduct polite and friendly conversations, address them by their names and insert a good joke once in a while. And here, such software as live chat offers one of the best ways of achieving such personalization of customer communication. Let’s take a closer look at some of the major benefits using a live chat for customer service brings to a company.

Higher conversion

Winning the trust of new clients and guiding them from brand discovery through installation, onboarding, or registration tends to be one of the most difficult tasks. However, many customers opt not to leave their contact information or make a purchase during the last phases of the customer journey. More often than not, these situations arise as a consequence of a customer's inability to immediately contact a brand representative to enquire about some important details such as product specification or availability of a particular payment option. While composing an email or making a phone call diverts the customer's attention, lowering the likelihood that they will return to it later, a live chat that pops up directly on the website page, increases the likelihood of a client completing the onboarding or registration process.

Convenience

With live chat, clients can contact a company without disrupting their day by typing text in a chat window while multitasking and enquiring about products or services without having to pick up the phone and dial a number. They also save time by simply starting a chat session from whatever page they are on, without devoting time to finding contact information, such as corporate email addresses and phone numbers.

Useful insights

Live chat can gather a wealth of relevant data about website visitors and their inquiries. The details, such as what page or activity caused a customer to start a live chat sessing can help customer experience and other departments in refining every operational process, website’s performance, and logic.

Also, such tools as pre and post-chat surveys provide many details about customers, from their contact information, useful for a future promotional activity, to their satisfaction with the support provided, useful for assessing the quality of support agents’ performance. All of this can be utilized to further enhance user experience, website content, brand positioning, and so on.

More loyal customers 

Numerous pieces of research show that live chat has the highest level of customer satisfaction of any support channel, surpassed only by 1-on-1 phone calls. Its convenience mixed with rapid response enables clients to obtain a prompt answer to their inquiry without leaving a website page, while smart routing of a conversation to an appropriate professional helps to avoid the embarrassing waiting periods that everyone who has called support is aware of. All of these trains of live chat lead to increased customer loyalty and the nurturing of long-term relationships between them and the brand.

Affordability

Nothing is worth more than the loyalty and complete satisfaction of customers, but successful businesses always keep their eyes on the tab and carefully measure the return rate of every investment made. In this aspect, live chat shines as well. It offers a low-cost alternative to phone service, which can cost 15-25% less per interaction, compared to voice interactions. Live chat needs a smaller budget on infrastructure and technology, as well as personnel: a single agent can easily handle several text chats at the same time — hardly achievable with phone calls.

Live chat comes as an invaluable tool for enhancing the quality of customer support sales conversion, providing real-time help, automating replies, and improving customer experience. More and more companies realize its value and add it to their rosters of available customer communication options.