UK businesses will now be scrambling fast to get back to some sort of normal, now there is roadmap out of Covid lockdown, and with the prospect of customers returning in droves, businesses are looking towards 24/7 Live Chat to help them maximise service levels and convert opportunity.
SO HOW DOES LIVE CHAT WORK?
Live chat is a simple bit of technology placed on websites that gives website visitors the option to engage in a textual chat with a live person who is on hand to answer questions or take leads. A fully-managed live chat service will deliver an expert agent available to engage with customers 24/7, all year round.
The web visitor might have a question they need answering, express an interest in a product or service, or may be ready to jump in and buy. Whichever way, Live Chat is a great way to start a conversation and begin that customer relationship, before the visitor has the chance to abandon the website and move over to a rival.
The outcome of these conversations can then be fed directly into a CRM system, or emailed to the relevant company department for them to be actioned.
IS LIVE CHAT GOOD FOR SMALL BUSINESSES?
Businesses of all shapes and sizes benefit from having Live Chat on their websites, so long as customers who need answers are visiting them. Live Chat has been proven to boost conversion rates by as much as 50% because it is so effective at connecting customers with businesses at the point when the customer is the most motivated and the buying signals are hot.
And for a small business, that needs to manage any volume of customer enquiries on limited budgets or staff numbers, Live Chat is an invaluable, cost effective way of filtering and progressing early stage opportunities.
IS LIVE CHAT ONLY FOR B2C?
Any type of company can have live chat on their website, whether it’s B2B sites selling products or services to an industry, or B2C sites offering all manner of products of every size to the public. It’s especially effective at optimising basket values on e-commerce websites, where visitors can get immediate and direct answers to their questions, thus clearing the pathway to a purchase there and then. But it's equally valuable on B2B sites where visitor questions in the consideration phase are high, and converting to booked appointments is a key site objective.
While live chat is clearly a highly effective method of generating leads from websites, it is also an exceptional platform on which to offer customer service help too. Live Chat is an indispensable triage tool that helps reduce the resource spent by public organisations with high traffic sites such as councils, charities and dispute resolution services. By using live chat to qualify inbound enquiries, dispute resolution services for example, can guide people with complaints through the correct channels with the minimum of resource.
HOW DO YOU HANDLE CUSTOMERS ON LIVE CHAT?
Live chat is no different a communication channel from any other when it comes to handling customers. Visitors expect the person they are engaging with to be as friendly, helpful and above all as professional as if they were speaking to them face to face.
Moreover, online consumers expect to receive an immediate response to their query, no matter what the time of day or night. At least 50% of traffic to business websites happens once the physical office or shop is shut. This is because people browse when they’re not at work – and to have someone knowledgeable looking after them out-of-hours is an impressive level of customer service that translates into greater sales.
DOES OUTSOURCED LIVE CHAT WORK?
It can be expensive and labour intensive manning live chat from within your business, if you want it to be online 24/7, and even just during normal business hours it can be impossible to be on hand to answer live chat enquiries within seconds and not miss any. That’s where a fully-managed service by a dedicated outsourced live chat provider comes in.
It simply isn't cost-effective for companies to utilise their own highly skilled, more expensive staff to manage initial enquiries, qualifying and filtering them to assess opportunity. Live Chat is a channel that requires constant and immediate attention, and trained operators who provide a dedicated service are proven to achieve higher conversion levels than in-house teams who are compromised by multiple objectives.
Yomdel’s 24/7 fully-managed live chat service is used by hundreds of companies from dozens of industries to handle all their 24/7 live chat requirements. We have teams of expert operators who are fully trained to handle business enquiries and capture leads with a first response time of less than 10 seconds, 24/7.
If you are interested in discussing how Yomdel can help your business improve enquiry handling, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
