It would have been difficult to miss the rise of live chat over the last few years, with an increasing number of companies adding that little bubble to the bottom-right corner of their websites showing that someone is available to chat. But why has live chat become such a popular addition to websites large and small?
1. Customers like chat
This seems obvious, but a number of research studies have found that customers enjoy seeing live chat options on a website as they believe it shows a company is making an effort to communicate and they are on-hand to answer personal queries, something which often gets lost in online transactions, whether the customer is using a large ecommerce store or signing up for a popular gaming website.
Websites can contain huge amounts of information that can sometimes be difficult to find, and live chat makes it possible for potential customers to have their queries answered immediately, and such easy help can guide them towards making a purchase. And just by having the live chat option, customers say they are more satisfied with the customer service available, which in turn can drive word-of-mouth marketing.
2. Live chat is cheaper to manage and requires fewer support staff
Phone support, whether offered directly by the company or via a call centre can be expensive requires significant investment in both personnel and telephony infrastructure to handle call volume. In contrast, cloud-based chat technology is available for reasonable monthly fees, and as a customer support employee can work on multiple requests simultaneously, each employee can handle significantly more support requests. If you add into the equation the ability for simple and repetitive support requests to be handled by chatbots with only more complex questions escalated to the support team, then companies can see even greater efficiencies.
3. Everyone is helped by the paper trail
Phone support has long been the way to help customers on a one-to-one basis, but as the query is handled vocally there is no way for the customer to easily archive the information they receive. This means it is difficult for future support calls to take into account this past conversation, so getting the new support agent up-to-speed can be a large waste of time and resources.
Live chat makes it very easy for both the customer to get a transcript of the chat, so they have the information to rely on in the future, and for support staff to archive the chat to a certain customer email address, so that they can review the information immediately should that customer need to ask for help again.
Maybe it is about time you should look into adding live chat to your website?
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