Ironically, investing in Live Chat Software, and managing chats yourself may not be the most cost-effective way to provide an instant response handling service on your website.
How many times do you want the answer to something there and then?
Sitting in front of the TV any evening, with your tablet or mobile phone on your lap, do you find yourself browsing the internet and moving from site to site if you don’t’ find what you are looking for?
Yep. Sounds familiar. And so do millions of others every day.
With instant, far reaching technology in the hands of your potential customers, it’s business critical to be available to them at the moment that THEY are interested. The moment they have chosen to browse your products or services.
How much money have you spent by this moment, to get these visitors on your website. This is a marketing holy grail moment, yet so many businesses choose to limit the visitor’s opportunity to connect.
There is an abundance of ways to allow a visitor to your website to connect with you, yet the ones deployed are so often chosen with the business, rather than the customer, in mind. Minimising cost, batch processes, staff productivity – all lead to businesses choosing web enquiry forms, bulk service email addresses, and in some cases even a phone number.
But they all end up in the hands of the same daytime staff teams, who try their hardest to deliver a great response, but too often, it is too late. The customer moved on to another site where they did get an answer.
You may know by now that I am a particular fan of 24/7 Live Chat. I admit it, I’m new to the industry and I’m a convert. By far the biggest reason I love it, is that it allows me to get answers to questions from a business, outside of traditional trading hours, online there and then. But here’s a few more:
- It allows me to get answers without having to wait on a phone queuing system
- I can multi-task, and do other things at the same time
- It helps my decision making, without feeling pressured to take a course of action
- I can articulate my requirements quickly and precisely in a sentence of text
- I can do this 24/7 whilst I’m still on the website I’m interested in
Now, there are many Live Chat solutions available in the marketplace today, and it’s easy to get confused. When I say ‘Live’ I do not include Bot solutions. A Bot will not provide the flexibility of question and answering that I love in the experience I describe above. If I only want one thing, and the business can anticipate that, then a Bot might work, but fundamentally, if a business decides on Live Chat Software, it has two choices:
- Buy Live Chat Software, and employ their own staff to manage and respond to chats.
This often involves a team of people that operate Live Chat as a secondary part of their day role, or Live Chat being incorporated into an existing service operation.
- Outsource Live Chat handling to a fully managed service provider, with their own software.
This involves a provider deploying a team of agents, available 24/7, to answer initial questions immediately. Trained on your brand and services, they help consumers navigate through their queries, and capture details for your team to follow-up.
THE ‘DO IT YOURSELF’ APPROACH
Those businesses that do not fully understand the consumer journey, add Live Chat to their website as a solution to enquiry handling, and attempt to manage it themselves unaware of the challenges:
- Staff are not comfortable conversing via Live Chat, if their primary role is via the telephone. The skillset, grammar, information handling and articulation all differ.
- If added to staff roles as a secondary task, chats are invariably de-prioritised, delaying response times, resulting in the customer having a poor experience
- Some businesses actually offer Live Chat, but switch it off when they are too busy, or cannot resource an out of hours service, so do not offer a 24/7 Live Chat service, again resulting in a very poor consumer experience.
I was online last night and wanted to buy some shoes, I noticed a Live Chat box in the bottom right-hand corner and had a question. When I clicked on the box it showed me the hours of operations Mon- Saturday 09:00-17:30. No different to the stores operating hours. This is an example of how not do Live Chat. I immediately clicked off the site and went elsewhere to search for my shoes as they couldn’t answer my questions as there was no one available via their website.
THE ‘TRUST THE EXPERTS’ APPROACH
Those businesses that win are those that understand how Live Chat or web chat on their website is going to add value to their business. How it will play an integrated role in their sales, service levels and engagement with their existing and new customers:
- The outsourced Live Chat service is an extension of their team, enabling 24/7 response, against agreed, guaranteed service levels.
- The service provider will ensure all agents are fully trained, and manage a database of all required information, to ensure high quality, accurate response handling.
- Trained operators, expert in Live Chat, respond instantly ensuring no sales leads are lost, and know how to nurture enquirers who are happy to leave their details as a result.
- Outsourcing Live Chat allows a business to maximise the productivity of their own teams, prioritising their focus on higher value processes. Live Chat is used as a first line of enquiry to help with service delivery and filter the most valuable leads.
In the end, outsourcing your Live Chat to be managed by experts, not only costs you less in the long term, avoiding damage to your brand through under-servicing your visitors, but also costs less in the short-term, not spending excessive time and money putting unfamiliar service and processes together, and eventually needing to deploy extra staff.
A great example of this is the property sector where the housing market has surprised everyone in 2020 remaining buoyant. Estate Agents use Live Chat to engage with and respond to buyers and sellers, when their teams are busy during office hours, and of course handling enquiries from potential clients out of office hours. Most importantly, they are able to follow up on leads generated through Live Chat, that they otherwise may have lost by not offering a 24/7 web chat service on their site.
Read our case study from Arun Estates, who began by managing Live Chat themselves.
At Yomdel we have seen a significant growth in many sectors outsourcing 24/7 Live Chat for their websites, for all the reasons outlined. Many use the functionality to continually improve their services, adding appointment booking, pricing and quote provision, to meet ever greater customer demands, all with a focus on lead generation.
Ever heard the phrase “We are easy to do business with”? Well 24/7 Live Chat is a way of doing this, to ensure you meet customer expectations.
If you want to hear more, why not get in touch via Live Chat, I’d be happy to arrange an appointment to understand your requirements and see how we can meet your customer demands 24/7.
