We have some important news for you. Not all live chat is equal.
Live chat is a fantastic tool for connecting with and helping your prospective customers and visitors to your website. It’s helped businesses build an online presence in virtually every sector and is now considered to be an essential tool on any serious website.
If a customer wants to make an enquiry or raise a question, they’re now statistically more likely to look to online chat above all other options, including email or telephone. The reason is simple. Convenience. No other platform makes it as easy for the customer to get in contact with you, without having to drop everything they’re doing themselves, and they also know they will get an immediate response to their enquiry. No other platform can tick both of these boxes.
According to Freshworks.com 41% of customers prefer live chat, whereas 32% prefer phone support, 23% prefer email, and 3% prefer social media for support. This means that live chat is now the number one platform for businesses to offer support.
Trying to man live chat yourself can be a difficult and time-consuming task.
There’s some great live chat software out there, ranging from basic freeware to premium products which offer all sorts of functionality including advanced visitor data. Some of this software is incredibly useful and powerful, but most of them unfortunately don’t solve the main problem that businesses face when trying to offer a live chat service on their website. Availability and resourcing are the biggest factors that affect how well live chat performs. Some businesses fail to implement those properly and then decide that web chat is not suitable for them or opt for another option, such as chat bots.
Chat bots offer limited functionality. In our experience, they can be used for filtering conversations to the correct team or department but this is only really viable for very large organisations. Other than that they effectively become an automated FAQ, which can be more frustrating that useful for the end user. In fact, the use of chat bots should be very carefully considered since the user will always be able to tell quite quickly that they’re not speaking to a real person. It would be unethical to make it appear that you’re chatting to human if you’re not. Not only would your customer service suffer but you would also be found out very quickly, damaging your reputation.
“Do what you do best and outsource the rest”
Peter Drucker
Here at Live Web Chat, we can help support your customers with our powerful software and professional team of agents working directly via your website, answering queries, and engaging with clients the moment they ask a question. We offer a highly personalised service, getting to know and understand your business so that we can help your website visitors quickly and effectively, achieving excellent levels of customer service for you and your business.
Contact us today to find out more about how Live Web Chat can help you convert website visitors into paying clients. You can find out more about what we offer on our website, or by calling us on 01273 741113.