12 Epic Benefits of Live Chat for Your Business [#4 Is Unusual]
Sandra Roosna
Askly CEO & Founder
Ever experienced it?
You're a business owner and your website is growing steadily.
However, you're not converting as many visitors into customers as you'd like.
And the main reason might be because of your customer service.
Email or phone customer support is not effective enough in today's world.
And you need a much faster and more reliable customer communication channel such as live chat.
You might've had bad experiences with live chat in the past like slow or generic responses, but not all live chats are the same.
So, if you want to convert more browsers to buyers, build long-term relationships, and improve customer service productivity.
Let's dive into the benefits of a live chat and the many ways it can help your business.
What Is a Live Chat Exactly?
Think of live chat as instant human live customer support.
In fact, a live chat is a tool that you install on your website to make customer communication and support much easier.
For example, let's say one of your potential customers isn't sure about one of your product's features.
They can click on the live chat icon on your website to get all its benefits like asking a question and getting an answer from your representatives in no more than 10 minutes.
Pretty simple, isn't it?
The Major Benefits of a Live Chat For Your Business
79% of businesses have reported that providing customers with a live chat greatly benefited their sales and conversions.
But that's not all.
In fact, there are many other benefits that live chat provides for your business, including:
1. Turn Visitors Into Buyers
Have you ever thought about how incredible it'd be to turn 25%+ of your visitors into paying customers?
In fact, you can increase your conversion rate by as much as 20% with a live chat on your website.
How?
By focusing on helping customers who are currently purchasing on your website as quickly as possible.
In fact, there are two main reasons why website visitors may look at your product and not buy it:
- They don't trust you enough
- They are unsure about something specific about your product
In short: Your potential customers have unanswered questions and solving those problems will translate into more conversions.
Imagine you're in a car dealership but you're unsure about some car's features.
If there's a sales representative there who answers all your questions clearly and fast, you'll be a lot more likely to buy the vehicle, aren't you?
2. Significantly Better Than Email & Phone Support
Most of your clients are not comfortable calling you.
Specifically the younger demographic of Millennials, that in 5-10 years will be the majority of the consumers.
Also, most modern consumers don't want to wait days for a simple answer to their questions through email.
On top of that, your customers prefer to leave their online anonymity untouched.
Especially when they speak to customer support.
A live chat has the benefit of preserving your clients' anonymity while providing them with lightning-fast customer support.
In fact, your support team can still operate with the data gathered from the customers' location, browser activity, devices and products they've viewed without disclosing their personal information.
And with more than 1.4 million reports of identity theft in recent years globally, you can't blame your customers for wanting to maintain anonymity.
Safe, yet personal, customer service at PoP (point of purchase) is a must-have for e-commerce businesses of any size.
3. Build Rock-Solid Relationships
Sales are not everything in business.
You can get a conversion once, but if you don't build a solid relationship with your customers, they won't return for a second time.
But how do you build a stronger relationship with your clients and turn them into repeat buyers?
One of the best ways is by having excellent customer support through the benefits of a live chat.
Proper customer support is professional, knowledgeable, and most importantly, fast.
In fact, if you need days to answer customer inquiries, your clients won't trust you.
And in general, perceive your business as one that doesn't care all that much about its clients.
4. Multilingual Support
While English is undoubtedly one of the most popular and known languages around the world, there are a lot of potential clients who might not be comfortable speaking English.
Maybe it's not their first language.
Or maybe they don't understand English all that well.
And a potential customer who doesn't understand your product is a customer that you've already lost.
In fact, 24% of US online adults use a chat for support because it's available in their preferred language.
For example, if you're on a website where customer support only communicates in a language you don't understand, would you still buy their product?
Probably not.
So what's the solution?
To ensure you lose no potential customer to language barriers, having a live chat with multilingual support is your best bet.
In fact, some live chats provide real-time translation in your customers' preferred languages as an additional benefit.
5. Reduced Abandoned Carts
Abandoned carts are a huge wasted opportunity.
Especially when it comes to eCommerce stores.
In fact, studies show how potential clients on average abandon 60-80% of carts in online stores.
Why is that?
There are lots of reasons that might explain why people leave their carts abandoned but one of the main ones is the lack of instant support.
When your clients shop at your store, they often have questions before committing to the purchase.
And if none of your representatives are there to solve their problems, they will probably not pull the trigger on the purchase.
6. Human-Support
If you hate AI generic customer support, your customers do as well.
Not only does AI support not feel genuine, but it is also extremely limited.
If your client has a specific question and the AI spews a generic answer, you've already lost them.
On the other hand, providing human customer support to your clients makes them feel valued and builds solid trust for your brand.
For example, let's say you're looking to buy a new smartphone but you need clarification on some features.
You ask questions to their AI support but all it does is provide generic and scripted responses.
Wouldn't you get turned off by that?
And that's the same way your clients would feel with AI customer support.
7. Drastically Reduce Duplicate Replies
When dealing with email and phone customer support, it is very easy to get confused.
And confusion leads to duplicate replies and many lost inquiries.
The fix?
A good live chat benefits from different communication channels in one place and a customer chat history your representative can access at any time.
Even if your customer is busy and comes back days after their question, your team can easily go back to the chat history and resume the inquiry.
8. Real-Time Replies
The more time passes between a client inquiry and your response, the higher your chances of losing the sale.
For that reason, you have to reply to your potential customers as soon as possible.
Which is essential not just when it comes to potential clients.
But also for existing ones.
In fact, your existing customers are much more likely to turn into repeat buyers if you provide them with continuous support along their journey.
9. Money Saver
A good live chat saves you lots of money by increasing efficiency.
Let me explain.
Your customer support agents need to deal with a lot of client inquiries at the same time.
Which can cost you a lot of money, especially if you rely on email, phone calls and social media support.
In fact, if you measure how much time your agents spend replying to emails and social media DMs without ever converting those customers, you'll notice that the cost of a live chat is a fraction compared to the money you'd waste for the additional work hours.
This can become a big problem if your business grows and you're getting increasingly more customers.
Now, instead of hiring more agents and paying for more work hours, with a live chat, you can have the benefit of handling multiple inquiries at the same time.
On one unified platform.
This way, you will reduce the overall cost of your help desk.
While also increasing the average order value since you're answering clients very fast.
10. Great Competitive Advantage
Let's do a test.
Go to your biggest competitors and see if they have a live chat on their website.
Let me guess…
They have one, right?
Live chats have many benefits, especially for online stores.
And all your biggest competitors know this.
So, if you want to be on equal footing as your competitors, you should also get a live chat app on your website.
On top of that, in the past six months, 53% of online adults benefited from live chat to get customer support.
11. Multiple Communication Channels in One Place
A good live chat lets your customers stay on the product page while providing easy access to all your communication channels in a few clicks.
By adding email forms, FAQs, or WhatsApp to the live chat widget you can make sure customers never have to leave the product page to search for customer service.
For example, you can add answers to common questions your customers have inside the chat box.
This way, when a customer asks that specific question, your support agent can instantly send them the existing reply.
Reducing waiting time for your clients even more.
12. Superior Team Collaboration, Analytics & Tracking
Taking care of multiple customers at the same time is no easy task.
Even if you have a customer support team to do it.
With a live chat you can assign inquiries, leave notes, and track your team's performance in a few clicks, and get crucial data such as average response time or set up challenges with rewards for your best performing agents.
This way, you will improve your customer support even more and have even happier customers.
Looking to Turn More Website Visitors into Buyers?
Seeing many potential customers visiting your website and not buying can be frustrating.
And one of the best fixes to that is having a live chat on your website.
But not all live chats are the same, and you have to pick the right one for your business to get tangible results.
At Askly, we provide one of the most advanced live chats on the market.
While also having a hassle-free setup process and guaranteeing the best possible customer experience for your clients.
Moreover, Askly is the only live chat with built-in triggers, automated replies and localization to skyrocket customer experience.
Just plug it in with a few clicks and get your team ready to deal with all your customer support needs with ease.
On top of that, 70% of our customers increased customer satisfaction and 32% benefited from more recurring purchases with our live chat.
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