So far we have seen that live chat benefits a business in a number of ways. It can help reduce the bounce rates and site abandonment rate, boost sales and build strong customer relationships. There’s one more benefit of using live chat on your website. Wondering what it is? Well, live chat if used appropriately can increase your business’s conversion rates. Want to know how? Read on.
Continue reading “Live chat for conversion: Here’s how it boosts your business’s success”
1. Transfer chat sessions when required:
Since individual agents may have different areas of expertise, so, provide them with a list of other agents and their levels of expertise. This helps in cases where a chat agent is involved in a conversation that has got to do nothing with his current level of expertise. Such that, without much ado, he quickly transfers the chat to another agent ensuring that the customer is aware of the transfer.
2. Make use of typing indicators:
Your live chat software should include typing indicators. It should enable the agents to see a customer’s words as they type, and issue an alert when the customer has hit the “send” button. This feature gives the agents insight to what the customers are thinking as they type and also allows the respective chat agent to respond quickly without making the customer wait for long time periods. The alert should be audible, visible, or both such that it lets the agent know that a customer is awaiting a response.
3. Program targetted pages to raise chat offer:
As a matter of fact, just raising the offer to chat is enough to convey a sense of goodwill. Allow customers to browse on your site for a time before raising the offer to chat. Identify a list of target pages where you want to increase the conversion rate, and program them to automatically raise the chat offer after a period of 30 – 60 seconds such that the customers get enough time to be oriented for the chat.
4. Create a set of professionally designed canned messages:
Customers should be greeted professionally when they arrive within a live chat conversation. Professionally designed canned messages can be employed for this purpose. Carefully worded standardized canned messages can be used to automate parts of the conversation and augment your professional profile in order to greet the customers with courtesy.
5. Employ CRM tool along with online chat:
All your chat agents should have access to customer sales records. Integrating online chat with CRM tool allows them to update the CRM records at the end of a chat session.
These days customers are increasingly using live chat as a communication channel to interact with websites to get instant help in case of any queries. Here are some tips to leverage online chat in order to reassure lead nurturing:
1. Offer a copy of the transcript to the customers:
Customers contact the live chat agents so that their queries are resolved instantly. The whole chat process provides them with valuable information. But, most people don’t record every conversation so this information can get lost or can be rendered futile. So, provide your customers with transcripts at the end of live chat sessions.
2. Include chat button in email campaigns:
This feature allows your customers to provide direct feedback on questions they may have regarding the email they’ve received from you. Emails could be anything from periodic newsletters or follow-ups to individual questions or grievances and embedded chat button along with it provides an ease of instant query resolution.
3. Provide chat agents with previous chat transcripts:
Providing your chat agents with a chat history for returning visitors allows the agents to come up to speed on issues that the customer discussed previously, and to proactively follow up with any questions. This will hasten up the live chat process and customers will appreciate the fact that they don’t have to repeat their previous problems to newly assigned chat agents.
4. Initiate an automatic response:
The only way to guarantee a quick response is to accept all incoming chats immediately. Once a customer initiates a chat session, the system should accept the chat automatically and convince the customer that a chat agent will respond shortly. Pre-canned messages can be used to welcome the customer and let him know that action is taking place immediately.
5. Inculcate pre-chat survey forms:
Pre- chat survey forms allow customers to set the direction of the conversation. They include questions that allow your chat agents the necessary background so they can provide a quick and courteous answer. The pre-chat survey forms also allow you to quickly route the chat session to the agents who are most qualified to handle the respective conversations.
1. Review your live chat agents’ performance:
Make it a point to review your live chat agents. Their training should include mock chats, secret evaluation and much more. Apart from that, distribute customer success manuals amongst your agents where all important tips and techniques of online customer support have been mentioned in written format. This will help them to go through the important tips whenever they have any doubts.
2. Inculcate tech support along with live chat:
In order to create a power-packed support environment make use of live chat features such as canned messages and links, the ability to push files and screen sharing and co-browsing. Also, train your agents to go slow and ask short, simple questions to get to the root of problems and to make solving them easier and faster. More important than training your agents to provide tech support is ensuring they have the resources they need readily available. Ensure your tech support agents are provided with canned links for knowledge based articles, how-to tutorials, videos and other resources they need to help customers resolve issues or problems instantly. Make sure the agents know how to find the resources quickly and then send them to the respective customers whenever they need them.
3. Help them to be platform experts:
LIve chat agents need to have thorough knowledge of the platform they are working on and the tools they are dealing in. When chat agents are familiar with the tools they are utilizing while assisting customers, they perform tasks with a higher level of confidence. Task your agents providing both a customer and organization friendly experience when chatting. It’s important to be fully trained on all customer and agent facing platform features. For this purpose, customers might be presented with a pre-chat survey while initiating a chat request, which gives the ability to choose the reason for wanting to communicate.
