5 advantages of adding live chat to your website

5 advantages of adding live chat to your website

After a long day of work, as you’re about to shut off for the night, and your kid asks you

“Hey, I want a laptop! The one we have right now is waaay too slow.”

Reluctantly, you open up your laptop and visit your favorite e-commerce store. 

Typically, you go on here to browse, but this time, you’re on a mission to find the perfect laptop for your kid. Problem is, you’re not sure where to start! Then from the corner of your eye, you see that little blue box, followed by a little chime. 

“Hey James, welcome back! How can I help you today?”

“I’m looking to buy a laptop.”

“Sure! Would you like to browse through our catalogue, or speak with an agent?” 

And 30 minutes later, you have a laptop (and a couple of accessories) on its way and a chirpy kid. Now you actually have time to unwind without the decision fatigue. 

Live chat isn’t just for customer support these days. Adding it to your website can have many advantages. Live chat can be used as an easy way to navigate through the sales funnel and increase conversions. 

What are the advantages of adding live chat to your website?

1. User-friendly

2. Proactive approach to communication

3. Increase in average order value

4. Real-time data to further improve CSAT scores

5. Easier to scale

User-friendly

Along the spectrum of customer experience tools, between the agility of phone calls and the sluggishness of web channels, you can find chat right in the middle. It’s the happy medium for most support times and customers. 

When it comes to the tier list of channels for customer support, most customer tend to gravitate towards phones and away from emails. Customers kind of expect their problems to be resolved in over 5 business days over email, but within half an hour during phone calls. 

The problem is even 30 minutes can be too long for a customer, and speed is king during the digital age. That's why people are opting for web live chat in the new landscape of customer experience. 

Customers expect contact center agents to be quick. Once the query is stated, answers are to be expected in less than 20 seconds while maintaining a fluid conversation, but that isn’t enough time for agents to think. It’s usually followed by “hm’s...” and “um’s...” and “ah’s...” and the faint clacking from the keyboard as they scramble to find an answer.

Compared to phone calls, chat doesn’t require responses as quickly. Built-in pauses give your live agents enough time to collect their thoughts and refer to your knowledge for information to provide a better response to customer queries. 

In addition, live chat also provides a linear form of communication that follows a top-down approach. Customers can easily lay out their questions, and agents can answer it one by one. Whereas on a phone call, the customer starts with one problem, and they’re already moving on to the next one. 

Live chat alleviates the pressure from the customer support agent and allows them to critically think and respond to customer needs at once and in confidence. 

Proactive approach to communication

There’s a difference between being approached by a customer support representative, and approaching a customer support representative. Which one takes more effort? The latter, so why put your customers through that? 

With the earlier example, you can understand how easy it was to buy the laptop through the live agent. Did James approach the agent? No. It was the chatbot initiated the conversation which allowed for a smooth purchasing process. 

Quality live chat platforms will allow routing that complements your agent’s strengths. If your live agent specializes in inquiries on laptops, your live chat platform should allow you to configure your routing settings so that your agents can handle all laptop queries. 

This proactive approach to communication allows any website visitors to receive the information at faster speeds since the query is being handled by someone who specializes in that area.

Faster speeds, happier visitors, and you might just convert a browser to a buyer.  

Increase average order value

Speaking of converting browsers to buyers, did you know that live chat can also help you increase the value of the sale?

It’s the same premise as going to a store to buy gaming console for your kids, and leaving with a console and a couple of video games, controllers, sleeves, and so on. A live agent on your website can do the same thing. You’re not only leaving with a laptop after talking to an agent, you’re also leaving with a case, a laptop bag, and some headphones. Even if the conversation is happening from screen-to-screen, live chat allows agents to put their personality in and make even greater sales by personalizing the customer’s experience. 

Real-time data to improve CSAT scores

Emailing gives you a record of the messages sent between your customers and your support-team in an unstructured manner.

Phone calls (if you choose to record conversations) gives you a recording of the conversations between your customers and your support also in an unstructured manner. That is, if you have the luxury of listening to conversations, taking notes, making observations about how the query is getting resolved, where things go south, etc.

Chat transcripts on the other hand, can be extremely helpful in improving CSAT scores. Live chat comes with tons of valuable data. Pre-chat surveys are rich in information, providing agents and teams with enough information about your customers. 

If you notice most customers before talking to a live agent have questions about a particular topic, you can frame better FAQs to make your product more intuitive. You can also use this information to set up automated responses for your chatbot to decrease your average response time. The lesser time it takes to resolve a query, the happier your customer.

You have access to all kinds of reports with a quality live chat provider like Engati. Displayed in pie charts and graphs, you’ll have access to data around SLAs, average resolution times, user feedback to push yourself and your teams to work harder to ace the customer support game.

Easier to scale

Would you rather resolve one query in half an hour, or 5 queries in half an hour? That’s the difference between using live chat to solve for complex customer queries versus dealing with them over the phone. It is much easier scale customer support on a digital platform like Engati. Engati provides a one-view inbox of all incoming queries, which allows agents to jump between conversations without the dreaded “please be on hold, our agents will come back to you.” It’s a win-win situation for both customers and agents. 

All of these advantages in one place 

Find all of advantages in one platform. The combination of LiveChat with a chatbot platform will allow for the most optimized customer experience, built to support a winning CX team. 

Explore Engati LiveChat + chatbot platform for free. No credit card needed.

?Originally posted at (https://www.engati.com/blog/website-live-chat-advantages)