By David Olson
With their rapidly growing popularity, live chat systems are hard to miss. You can find a live chat system in countless online stores and even B2B sites. The question still remains though, do these chat systems actually bring in more revenue? The quick answer is that yes, they do! Here are five ways that live chat can increase your revenue.
1. Guide More Visitors Through the Conversion Process
Live chat systems are a way to provide instantaneous help to your site visitors. No one has to sit around and wait while a customer service representative answers an email, and customers don’t have to fight their way through a phone-based answering system to get in touch with customer service. There is a dedicated customer service rep right in front of the shopper, ready to give instant feedback.
This means that you can guide far more visitors through your online store and into the conversion process. Every online business loses countless leads due to frustration, confusion, or unanswered questions. With live chat, you can easily increase your sales simply by helping visitors get what they need.
2. Personalize the Experience
Human beings are creatures of habit. The more familiar and comfortable a process becomes, the more people tend to repeat it, and even have trouble breaking from that process as it continues on. But how does this translate to live chat?
Live chat allows a personalization of the shopping experience. Your customers can get to know your customer representatives personally and quickly through the live chat system. This establishes a rapport that customers are drawn to. If customers have a positive experience being helped by someone they like, and benefit from the product that they order, they are much more likely to return and keep returning after that.
3. Find More Opportunities for a Sale
With the right training, every customer service representative behind a live chat window can double as an effective salesperson. Is a visitor just browsing the site and not sure what to get? Is someone asking for help with a certain issue, or unsure of what to purchase for a friend, family member, or lover? These are all opportunities to sell a specific item, and make visitors aware of a certain sale or coupon, which will lead to further conversions.
A live chat is also a great way to improve your upselling and cross-selling capabilities. With a richer and more immediate method of interaction with the customer, your customer service and sales reps have an easier way to come up with additional products that the customer might be interested in.
4. Create Greater Efficiency
Greatly improve the efficiency of your customer service team with a live chat option! It works like this: every service call requires a single person on the line who is handling a customer issue. With a live chat system, a single customer service rep can juggle multiple lines of inquiry without customers having to wait. With a more efficient customer service system, you lower the chances of frustrated and unsatisfied customers who leave without a purchase.
Further, this also cuts down on employee costs, as you can administer more customer service help with fewer people, and make better use of the revenue you collect. It is true that email-based customer service can manage multiple inquiries simultaneously as well, but email tends to take a little bit longer. Live chat on the other hand is instantaneous.
5. Get Instant Feedback
Potential customers love to have instant feedback. The reality of online shopping is that there are countless competing websites that are just a click away. It only takes a couple of seconds for a frustrated customer to go somewhere else until they find what they are looking for. With live chat, the customer is engaged right away, and it is more difficult to leave without finding what they are looking for.
These are just some of the ways in which a live chat system can help you increase your revenue. With skilled implementation and careful customer service training, your live chat can help make your website a much more enjoyable experience for customers, and greatly increase your sales in the process. No wonder they’re popping up all over the place!
