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When it comes to servicing your website visitors, how are you tending to their every need?
For many business owners, the majority of their time and money goes into producing the perfect products and services they’re sure customers will want to buy. However, if not enough consideration goes into customer service and support, then it’s a wasted opportunity for a business to grow.
Live chat is a great way to connect with users and make them comfortable with your brand if they aren’t already. It uses artificial intelligence and pre-programmed statements to perform actions and hold conversations with site visitors. If you have yet to implement live chat on your website, it may be time to reconsider.
Why Use Live Chat?
Adding live chat as a feature on your website comes with many benefits:
- It provides convenience for both the consumer and the business. Speaking to customer service is usually a frustrating process that wastes time with long holds. Live chat provides instant communication between your business and its site visitors so you can meet their needs efficiently.
- It pushes customers through the sales funnel. People aren’t likely to visit your website and make a purchase right away. It takes time to cultivate a relationship with users until they feel informed and ready to purchase. Live chat eases customers through the buying stages so they feel confident enough to buy your products and services. Like a domino effect, it boosts conversions and increases sales.
- It builds strong customer relationships. Customers will trust you more if they have a chance to chat with your business, even if it’s in the form of artificial intelligence. With so many ecommerce options to choose from, it’s crucial to form friendly, reliable relationships with your target market so they keep coming back.
- It reduces customer support costs. Hiring a team of customer service representatives and providing them with adequate training costs companies a lot of money. Implementing live chat significantly reduces support costs so you can invest it somewhere else.
Now that we know it’s worth the effort to implement live chat on your website, let’s look at how to use it so that it boosts conversions for your business.
Know Your Customer
You can buy the best live chat software on the market, but it won’t matter if you don’t know your target audience. These are the people who make up your customer base and find relevance in your products and services.
Knowing your ideal customers affects every area of your marketing and determines successful live chat is to your marketing strategy. Failing to market to the right audience will result in fewer conversions and sales.
So, it’s important to know who your target market is prior to implementing live chat. Collect user data using surveys, polls, email, and social media. Research your competitors’ customers to see what they’re currently interested in and what makes them want to buy. You can use this information to create detailed buyer personas that make it easier to assist website visitors.
Once you’ve mapped out your customer profiles and know who you’re marketing to, it’s easier to choose the live chat software that aligns with your business goals.
Create an Emotional Connection
According to Bain and Company, acquiring a new customer costs a business anywhere from five to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. But how do you create such a solid first-time experience for visitors that it makes them keep coming back?
You can set your brand apart and cultivate strong relationships with customers by creating an emotional connection using live chat technology. If all you see them as are consumers, it will drive them away to your competitors. They know that if your brand doesn’t cater to a positive customer experience, then another brand will.
Consider how you can use live chat to appeal to your customers. The more eager your brand is to help visitors, answer their questions, and provide support, the more comfortable your customers will feel.
You can also use chatbots to reduce the need for live representatives and humanize your brand. Chatbot marketing uses artificial intelligence to help visitors and provide quick, reliable service. Beyond that, they’re good at prolonging user engagement and collecting valuable user feedback you can use to improve your conversion strategy.
The National Geographic created a chatbot designed to mimic Albert Einstein to promote a new show based on the scientist’s life. Users could visit the website and have a conversation with the Einstein chatbot about anything they wanted. As a result, its website’s engagement increased by 50 percent.
Engage Them with More Content
Your business needs content marketing to show up in search engines, position you as a leader in your industry, and build a loyal following. More often than not, users will need your live chat feature to navigate them towards another webpage on your site. Whether it’s a product they’re searching for or your FAQ page, you can use live chat to improve engagement and increase website conversions.
If visitors need help with a topic or question that your brand covers, live chat can lead them to relevant blog posts on your website. Companies with blogs receive 97 percent more links to their website than those that don’t. And if you don’t have a blog at all, then you’re wasting a major opportunity to grow your brand.
You can also direct users to your social media content so they can continue engaging with your business even after they’ve left your site. However, note that it’s important only to direct them to information that’s relevant to their needs and interests. Linking them to content other than what they ask for feels overly promotional and may turn them away for good.
Offer Customer Support
Creating a meaningful experience for customers is crucial to winning their business and convincing them to come back for more. Part of that is providing excellent, reliable support that meets consumer expectations and gives them what they’re looking for.
Live chat makes it easy to offer assistance for online visitors, especially those who may be new to your site. Your brand has one chance to make a positive first impression, so your site must guide users where they need to go and provide solutions to their problems.
It’s important to set clear expectations for your live chat sessions before chatting with customers so there’s no room for confusion. For example, if you plan to make your site’s live chat available only during office hours, then you need to explicitly state that on your website. A customer looking for 24/7 assistance won’t be pleased to learn that your customer support team isn’t available.
The whole point of live chat is that it’s convenient and quick. So, it needs to work efficiently and dive right into the customer’s problem as soon as the conversation starts.
To offer the best customer experience, consider the most common problems your customers face on your website. Creating an FAQ (frequently asked questions) page can reduce the need for visitors to reach out to your brand so they can use that time browsing your products.
Collect Feedback
Using live chat on your business website isn’t only for chatting up visitors and leading them to your content. It’s also crucial for collecting user data so you can create a marketing strategy better suited to your ideal customer.
You can find out a lot about your visitors through their conversations on live chat. Not only can you collect information, but you can also ask them questions and add the answers to your arsenal of buyer personas.
At the end of each conversation, you can send a customer survey form to users to rate and review their experience with your brand’s live chat system. Their feedback is crucial if you’re going to improve your site’s customer service practices and give users what they really need. Ask relevant questions, keep the survey short and sweet, and thank them for their responses.
Over to You
Live chat is a valuable tool that many businesses utilize to increase sales, boost conversions, and generate leads. It takes the pressure off of you to be available to visitors 24/7 and quickly gets to the root of the problem. Not only is it convenient to use, but it also moves consumers through the sales funnel and keeps them happy. Will you be implementing live chat into your conversion strategy this year?
