Any business in today’s internet age needs to carefully weigh marketing strategy and costs. The internet gives a wide platform to showcase your website, products and offerings. The downside is that it gives everyone the same arena, and with the tremendous amount of information available it can be hard for a consumer to sift through everything and find your business. Marketing professionals will talk to you about things like SEO and search results which are both important but your bottom line probably focuses far more on actual conversion. Conversion rates measure the number of people or users that perform the action you are striving for. For instance, if your business has an online marketplace your conversion rate could measure the number of people that actually purchase items from your online store. Or if you are offering a subscription your conversion rate could measure how many people sign up for your subscription. Along with things like SEO and search results, live chats have become a useful tool in the marketing professional’s toolbox. This article will explain why and how live chats can be leveraged to lift your business’s conversion rates.
Live chats allow you to communicate with your customers and potential customers online. You may already be familiar with live chats as many retailers now utilize this tool. When you visit a website a bubble pops up saying something like, “Hello, my name is mark, Can I help you find anything or answer any questions you might have”, this is the company’s live chat service.
There are many benefits to using live chat for you and your customers.
- Live chat is convenient. If a prospective customer has a question, he or she does not have to send an email or pick up the phone. The live chat allows a person to ask a question quickly and hopefully receive a quick answer in response. We live in an era of convenience so if you can address as potential customer’s concerns with minimal effort on their part, you increase the likelihood of making the sale. This, in turn, increases your conversion rates.
- Live chat is relatively easy to setup. Live chat can easily be installed and managed. In some versions of live chat you simply add the appropriate code to your website and it only takes a minute or two to process. If this is not your area of expertise consider outsourcing the implementation and monitoring. The benefits of live chat can be well worth the expense.
- Live chat can give you useful information about your websites visitors. You can see who’s currently browsing through your website, which website your visitors access, which of those visitors are online and which went offline. This information can help you see in real time which webpages are most interesting to potential customers, which pages are not and where you are seeing conversions fail. These details could be used to refine and tailor your site to achieve better conversion rates.
- Live chat gives you an easy way to document and evaluate your customer service. Each live chat dialogue can be easily saved and archived. If there is a customer issue down the road, each live chat conversation can be reviewed and analyzed to determine if the agent acted appropriately. This also allows for customer accountability. If a customer claims he or she was given incorrect information, this can be easily verified or disproven by reviewing the live chat archives. The more reliable your customer service agents are the happier your clients will be. Happy clients lead to referrals and repeat business, increasing your sales and conversions.
- Live chat can save you resources and money. Live chat allows one customer service agent to answer multiple chat requests at once. If your customer questions are being fielded by phone agents they are restricted to handling one call at a time. The ability to multi-task means you don’t have to hire additional staff and can use those saved funds towards improving or expanding your business.
- Live chat allows you to be there for your customer every step of the way. If a customer becomes confused about a product or experiences a technical glitch your customer service representative can be there immediately and with a click of a button help resolve the issue. If a customer is not able to immediately resolve an issue or get a question answered he or she may simply leave and shop somewhere else. Having immediate service available throughout the entire process gives you a much higher possibility of finishing the sale and increasing your conversion rate.
- Live chat helps you target your trouble areas. If you don’t have live chat access you don’t have the ability to see where customers may be getting “stuck”. If you have multiple customers asking the same questions to your live chat representatives you are able to see the pattern and correct the problem areas. You can also leverage live chat archives to identity any recurring complaints. This, again, is an opportunity to correct or refine your process and increase your conversions.
Live chat is an opportunity to increase your positive reviews and online presence. Train your live chat personnel to effectively handle customer questions and concerns and then train them to politely ask customers to write a review of your service or like your website or Facebook page. They could also write a comment on your website about their experience. It is important to teach your staff to take advantage of every opportunity to get a positive customer interaction.
Live chat may seem like a small thing but it is the consistent and proper use of many small marketing tools that, when put together, will help create an advertising machine for your business. Live chat can provide useful information and opportunities for you to increase conversion rates and happy customers.
