Do you want to know how live chat software can help you get more leads and increase sales? Your help desk solution automates the major aspects of your customer service. But beyond that, it provides you with more benefits in improving your bottom line through live chat.
How can a live chat software help you get more leads and increase sales?
- Engage prospects in real time
- Customize messages
- Shorten sales funnel
- Improve lead nurturing
- Increase conversions
More and more consumers prefer to shop online. In Brizfeel’s 2018 report on Consumer Online Retail Shopping and Spending Behavior, where 30,000 consumers worldwide aged 18 to 65 were surveyed, it was found out that a quarter of them shopped at least once a week, and 67% made a purchase at least once a month. However, the trouble with shopping online comes due to the disconnection of someone who can answer the shopper’s question precisely and promptly.
Credits: brizfeel.com
Online shoppers want a live person to assist them when they shop online. In fact, 44% of online consumers say one of the most important features a website can offer is having a live person answer their question in the middle doing their online purchase.
Furthermore, live chat is helpful for 90% of customers. According to a survey by eMarketer, 63% of shoppers who used a help desk are most likely to return to the site while 62% of them are more likely to purchase from the website again. Thirty-eight percent of respondents also revealed they made the purchase due to the chat session. Hence, not only does it improve your customer experience, but it can drive sales as well.
At its core, help desk programs are tools that support your agents to monitor, prioritize, and solve your customer tickets. It has triggers and automation to leverage the quality of your customer service as a means to an end in various channels, including live chat.
Having one of live chat platforms implemented is not enough to leverage the quality of your customer service. It is crucial to choose one that provides you with essential features you can maximize to ensure your strategy is effective. You may also check out what is live chat software to gain insight into its features and benefits.
There are a plethora of live chat solutions available today. One of the most robust options is LiveAgent. It’s a full-featured help desk platform with a live chat system. You can sign up for LiveAgent free trial here to test out its functionalities. If you’re interested to look at other options, you may check out this top 20 live chat software solutions for the leading products in the category.
Without further ado, let’s dive into how live chat software can help you get more leads and increase sales.
1. Engage prospects in real time
Customers like to have their questions answered immediately when browsing your website. Response time plays an important role in preserving your customer’s patience and building their trust for your brand. A good help desk solution such as LiveAgent gives you tools you need to leverage providing a real-time response to your customers.
Unlike email or call center, the wait times in live chat is shorter. It also lets them feel a real person is ready and waiting to offer their help when they need them in real time. Customers can also multi-task and explore your website while waiting for your response. This setup forges customer engagement and productive conversation to build a relationship with your customers.
It is also a great platform to utilize for live chat lead generation as opposed to other channels such as landing pages. During a live chat, you can build trust by answering questions first before asking for the customer’s contact details.
Some features to use:
- Real-time chat. Provide answers that your customers need conveniently. You can add human factor to your website by enabling live chatting which sets you apart from your competitors.
- Business hours. Depending on your preferred help desk operation, you may customize your business hours to cater your customer service. LiveAgent has a feature that lets you use the live chat system 24/7, traditionally from 9 am to 5 pm from Mondays to Fridays, or combine both options.
- Proactive chat invitation. You may set up a chat invitation with a custom popup time for custom URLs on your website such as your pricing page. This can convert customers, strengthen their purchase confidence, and improve the shopping experience.
Additional tips:
- As much as possible, avoid “offline” chat.
- Make your live chat available 24/7 because your website doesn’t close.
- Answer immediately—an average response time of 2 seconds is a good tier to start. The quicker response rate, the better.
LiveAgent allows full customization of chat buttons.
2. Customize messages
Consumers are constantly bombarded by content on various channels. Hence, personalization is valued by consumers now more than ever. In fact, 74% of customers are frustrated when the website content is not personalized. At the same time, 83% of marketers revealed personalization of content is the biggest challenges they face as per Business 2 Community.
This goes to say that being robotic and immediately asking for the customer’s contact details may tick them off in the wrong way. It is best to deliver a personalized and targeted experience to your customer through engagement and responsiveness.
You may do so by creating a series of templates for chat and help desk conversations and personalizing your chat messages. This way, you increase the likelihood of transforming your buying persona into becoming sales leads which means a step closer to conversion.
Some features to use:
- Custom greetings. Set proactive greetings to a specific type of visitor. For instance, a specific greeting is sent for a first-time and returning visitor, based on their referring website, or the user’s location.
- Email templates. Configure email templates by formatting the HTML or plain text where the content is styled and edited.
- WYSIWYG editor. With a “What You See Is What You Get” view of your content, you can easily enter and format the style of your content for emails, email templates, and knowledge base articles.
Additional tips:
- Customize your chat window according to your branding with your company logo.
- Add the name and avatar of your agent for customers to feel they’re communicating with a real person.
- Use positive language, especially in difficult situations such as saying no to a customer.
3. Shorten sales funnel
A sales cycle is extensive and complicated. Using email, call center, or video calls involves a couple of back-and-forths, especially for a B2B sales journey. Conversion is not yet guaranteed and the prospect may lose interest along the way or find another option during this period.
With a quicker response time, you can immediately offer an automated demo on your website or refer an educational content in real time. This allows a sales rep to immediately follow up which reduces bounce rates, minimizes drop-offs, and close leads faster.
Some features to use:
- Canned messages. Macros speed up your response by utilizing a predefined sequence of text. It is enabled by simply clicking the canned message icon and select from the options saved.
- Agent collision detection. Avoid having two agents handle the same ticket through this feature as you can see who is viewing and answering a specific ticket.
- Ticket/customer insights. This elevates the quality of your help desk by getting to know your customers better. This gives you visibility over who you’re communicating with, storage of custom data, and their previous tickets, among others.
LiveAgent simplifies adding and creating contacts.
4. Improve lead nurturing
Fleshing out your buyer persona to gain a deeper understanding of their specific pain points, needs, and behavior is crucial. Live chat lets you immediately access your customer’s pain points and transform them into sales opportunities. This is a step towards addressing how does live chat increase sales.
How to do so? The help desk system stores a record of your previous interactions and conversations with your prospects. You gain insight over factors such as the type of content they have clicked, their browsing details (for example, operating system, location, and device), and the web pages they are visiting, among others. This helps live chat lead generation by honing in on their buying behavior or browsing habit to know where they are in their buying journey.
Some features to use:
- Chat history. All current chats and history can be viewed on a single screen. LiveAgent also has features for filtering by tags, date, and department, among others and directly accessing chat communication.
- Contacts. Maintains a record of your customer’s information, preferences, and other data captured in user fields.
- Ticket management. A complete stream of communication between your support staff and your customer.
5. Increase conversions
How does live chat increase sales? There are two major ways on how you can increase conversions and sales by using live chat. First, by educating customers and providing them with the right information they need while purchasing a product or service in real time. Next, by consistently providing good service, customers are bound to return as your brand becomes a more reliable option compared to your competitors.
Furthermore, live chat increases revenue as 77% of purchasers won’t buy from a website with no live chat option. An ICMI report also showed visitors who engage with your company have up to 4.5 times worth higher than those who don’t. There is also a 10% increase in order value from the sales of customers who engaged in a chat before making a purchase.
Some features to use:
- SLA. By defining unlimited service-level agreements, you can set rules to automatically assign agents to the right ticket.
- Mobile apps. A help desk solution of LiveAgent is also available on mobile iOS and Android to continue providing customer service on the go.
- Predefined answers. To save time and expedite response to customers who have the same issue or inquiry, you may set up a single, general response via LiveAgent to rationalize the workflow simply.
Which Live Chat Solution You Should Choose
LiveAgent lets you establish SLAs to expedite processes with accuracy.
With the numerous live chat solutions available today, you get more options to choose one that suits your workflows and requirements best. However, narrowing down your choices can be daunting. A program that offers simple integration and an intuitive interface is a good place to start. LiveAgent is one of the leading software solutions in this niche. The system is equipped with an intuitive interface, a rich set of features, and reliable integrations.
It is a help desk and live chat software that helps you stay on top of your customer requests coming from multiple channels in an organized way. It supports channels such as tickets, live chat, phone, customer portal, and social platforms. Additionally, it has a mobile app available for iOS and Android, a gamification feature, and a comprehensive reporting tool. It streamlines how you analyze your help desk performance, measure customer satisfaction rate, and identify crucial trends, patterns, and factors for customer service success.
When deciding which live chat solution to choose, it’s important to conduct a business evaluation to determine your pain points and decide which features you need. Pricing, integrations, and add-ons are other things worth considering. You can sign up for LiveAgent free trial here to test out its functionalities.
Conclusion
In this article, we covered how live chat software can help you get more leads and increase sales. The key reason behind these benefits is having an immediate response to your customers during their buying journey. A real live person via your help desk system who can walk them through the process may either make or break your sale.
Since live chat happens in real time, engaging your customers is streamlined. This lets you capture leads from your conversations easier. From there, you can use a data-driven approach—from insights you gather through the system—to improve conversions and drive sales. It also opens opportunities for upselling products through recommending the right product to the right customer. To optimize and automate this process, choosing a help desk solution with robust live chat tools is valuable.
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