You might have noticed over the past few years that phone-based customer service is being replaced — quite rapidly — by live chat websites. Whether you’re a fan of them or not from a customer perspective (and we are big fans), it’s a good idea to think about why companies are making this switch.
To help you, we’ve laid out the top 8 benefits of live chat for websites of all kinds. These key insights will help you consider whether you should also take your customer service online. From lower costs and a more manageable workload for your team to the international aspect and even improved SEO, you’ll find yourself wondering why anyone still uses phones!
1. Give your customers what they want
The first, and most obvious, of our benefits of implementing a live chat is how quick it is for customers. While telephones can be quick once the call has begun, your clients do not want to be waiting in a queue listening to piped music.
Then comes the smooth experience of a live chat. A lot of people out there are resistant to phone calls to the point of anxiety due to poor connections, background noise, and finding quiet places. However, your customers can start a conversation through a chat bot and continue working while they wait. It’s easy to see why so many companies have pushed toward live chat support for websites.
2. Customers can reach you from anywhere in the world…
If you have an international audience, live chat apps are super convenient. People all over the world can get in touch with you for free as long as they have an internet connection.
Similarly, if your customers are located internationally, you might find a lot of variation in linguistic levels. Having everything written down is a massive help for your customers. Compared to this, phone calls can be much more stressful from a linguistic perspective, which just adds to the benefits of implementing a live chat compared to more traditional channels.
3. …And you can talk to them in whatever language you need to
Online translation tools have now got to a point where they can be used quite reliably as an automatic translator. So how can you leverage that for your business?
Easy!
Instead of scouring the market for a polyglot who you will have to spend the first few weeks training, you can focus on hiring someone with proven customer service skills and let them get to work with a machine translator.
4. Take care of the pennies!
One of the top benefits of implementing a live chat for companies is that it can significantly reduce your expensive call center — and there are plenty of areas where you can tighten the purse strings.
Firstly, unlike with calls, one of your team can easily handle multiple chats at once. You can bump up your number of solved cases without ever having to put someone on hold. This means you can keep your team small and manageable, saving on the wage bill.
Similarly, you can save on hiring premises by using a remote office. As long as your team has internet access, you’re good to go. No need to worry about those disruptive background noises either.
Finally, by having a free live chat for websites rather than expensive calls, you can hire recruits from all kinds of countries, languages, and time zones.
5. Leverage multiple resources
Despite many of your customers thinking what they want is a human, a lot of the time what they really want are easy-to-follow instructions.
Save you and your customers time by creating a vast knowledge base, inspired by questions you frequently receive. Add this to your automated chat bot messages and you can start gaining a reputation as a great company for queries. You can improve your service furthermore by sending your user a customized form that asks them for feedback on your step-by-step guidance document.
6. Get to know your customers
With traditional means of customer service, it’s very easy to lose your customer conversations, and at best, you’ve got to sit and listen to entire conversations to get up to date. However, one of the benefits of implementing a live chat is that you can save an entire conversation within your CRM and keep easily searchable records on all your clients.
This means that anyone who logs on can communicate with a customer on their level. Whether the original sales agent is off sick, or if they haven’t worked with you for five years, everyone gets the same overview of the client before speaking to them. All this detailed info translates to a better experience for your customers and your team.
7. Use your live chat as an active sales tool
Most people expect live chat software for websites to be focused on customer service requests such as tracking packages, defective items, or upgrades.
However, with a bit of smart thinking, you can capitalize on another of the benefits of implementing a live chat by turning it into a sales tool — much like an online store assistant who welcomes customers and shows them around. With Bitrix24’s live chat capabilities, you can open the conversation automatically on your website and guide your customers towards a deal.
By announcing that you’re there to help and offering to solve any problems, your clients will be tempted to take the steps you want them to. This can help users who might not be too convinced as they land on your website.
8. Customers spend more time on your website
Other channels can create almost a brick wall. Faced with no other option than calling up a company, a lot of your users will simply close the tab and look somewhere else.
It’s not just your number of leads that recognize this drop off as a bad thing. Search engines like Google place a high value on how long users spend on your website — which is why video content is so popular these days. One of the key benefits of live chat on websites in terms of SEO is that it engages your customers, increasing the time they spend on your pages and pushing your content up the search engine rankings.
Set up your live chat and watch your numbers blossom
Now you’ve seen a bunch of the benefits of implementing a live chat for your business, you’ll surely be wondering why you haven’t started using it before!
Sign up to Bitrix24 today and revolutionize your customer service.
With our free live chat for websites, you get up to 12 users without paying a single penny. That’s right, you can start for nothing, and scale up only when your business starts to grow.
