While the use of live chat to drive sales and increase customer engagement is not a new practice, this business strategy is winning more fans than ever before. According to a study conducted by ATG Global Consumer Trend, currently 90 percent of users consider live chat a great solution when it comes to providing customer support. Another U.S. Wireless Customer Care Full-Service Performance Study reveals that businesses are able to connect to around 42 percent of customers over live chat. What’s more, the online tool outweighs other channels when it comes to delivering customer satisfaction. All in all, given the fact that skyrocketing your business revenue and profit is arduous in this age, using any telemarketing software that drives sales and enhances customer engagement is crucial. So, how do you go about implementing live chat to optimize your business performance?
Maintain Professionalism
Using a professional language — avoiding abbreviations, addressing the customer by his first name, and introducing your name — yet responding in a friendly tone, showing warmth and courtesy are some of the basics your agents must follow when providing customer support through live chat. Avoiding too much technical language or industry jargons and keeping your answers short and simple is, again, a good way to ensure that your customers are highly satisfied with your agent’s replies. In fact, according to a study conducted by
Econsultancy, live chat delivers the highest satisfaction levels in comparison to other consumer support channels – 73 percent being the current figure of customer engagement. How good customer satisfaction you are able to deliver depends on how well your contact center agents handle your business’ live chat.
Balance Availability with Visibility
Similar to the way, purchasing accurate telemarketing phone lists and procuring a professional telemarketing software does not guarantee sales, including a live chat option in your business webpage does not ensure good customer support. Seamless customer support first requires your live chat window to be available on your business’ webpage in a way that it is clearly visible to your customers and does not hinder their navigation at the same time. Again, to ensure that your customers receive the necessary help at the right time, the live chat screen should pop up well before your customers think of leaving your website.
Respect Timing
Timing is the key, while cracking a sale or creating an unwavering brand rapport. Prompt reply to your customer’s questions, therefore, should be the primary duty, as a delay of even a few seconds may create a bad impression about your customer support team; it may compel your customers to consider other options, especially if they are trying to do business with you for the first time. Ideally, the response rate of agents over chat must not exceed 30 seconds. In case of complex questions that take more time, agents should offer the support over call or email to avoid any delay.
Use Analytics
As they say – “Let the data drive the strategy”, data these days is used to analyze everything from experiential marketing to the study of human behavior. Analytics lets you gauge the comprehensive navigational-activity of your consumers on your webpage, and helps you find out the pages they visit most frequently. Given this information at your disposal, placing the live chat facility on pages that are most popular becomes easy; the result is increase in sales and customer satisfaction.
Last Words
The use of live chat by many businesses these days owes its reason to the fact that it is both — a great sales and customer satisfaction solution, when used efficiently. Agents have a little more time to get back to their customers, unlike a call where 5 seconds of silence may result in a disconnection. Businesses, who have high-performing sales teams, do use a professional telemarketing software and supply their agents with the most updated telemarketing phone numbers, however, they also consider it wise to equip their businesses with other sales and support channels such as live chat.
