In the present digitally-led business environment, brands need to focus on building the best in-store experience online to maintain a competitive edge. While social media engagement is growing at a fast pace, live chat remains an efficient tool to keep shoppers engaged online and offer them customized, real-time solution. A satisfied customer converts into business growth and thus, it is crucial for companies to implement live chat strategy that adds to the business’ bottom line.
Companies, willing to implement live chat strategy, can follow these steps to optimize customer’s online shopping experience and convert sales into leads:
Analyze Business Requirements
Organizations need to first understand how online live chat fits into their overall business strategy. It is important to benchmark the existing channels on specified goals and find out if a new channel would supplement or optimize the present effort. You can evaluate these questions:
- Will web chat lower costs through channel deflection?
- Will it boost customer satisfaction by reducing efforts?
- Will product sales improve if live chat strategy is implemented?
- Will it improve lead generation methods and help in maintaining a strong sales pipeline?
The general approach is to work on a pilot project as per the business goals, evaluate its impact and devise the web chat strategy accordingly to get optimal results.
Select an Appropriate Live Chat Solution
After evaluating the need for online chat, the next step is to select a best-suited platform that helps in establishing and sustaining customer connections. Software failures might drastically impact customer satisfaction and result in the negative A few factors you must to consider before choosing a web chat platform are:
- Should you host the platform or choose a Cloud-based solution?
- Should you use a reactive or proactive platform?
- Should the platform provide ‘passive assist’ or ‘active assist’ support method of guiding the customers on live chat?
In addition to these factors, organizations must also scrutinize the data security features and reporting capabilities of the platform such as chat transcripts, transaction history, etc. Other features like typing notification, changing font size, encryption and page pushing must also be analyzed. You must also consider the platform’s capability to conduct customer satisfaction surveys at the end of a chat session, and its capability to measure chat performance and provide quality reports. The platform must be scalable and sustainable, allowing users to stay competitive.
Complement Web Self-Service
Your live chat engine must not overthrow your website’s primary purpose of self-serve. Although customers eye support a number of times, they are mostly in favor of browsing without any help. Thus, the need is to strike the right balance and offer chat support intelligently across specific web dropout points, key acquisition and sales trigger points to support up-sell, cross-sell and sales conversions.
It is important to implement chat support carefully, ensuring that it works as a tool to either overcome the limitations of the website or supplement business objectives like improved CSAT and sales by focusing on key dropout points like home page, product page, payment page, features page, etc.
Customer Experience Management
Managing customer experience throughout the lifecycle is one of the most critical aspects of executing a new strategy to engage customers. Although chat is an informal channel of communication as compared to phone or email, customers still expect a quality experience. Few factors to keep in mind to manage customer experience are:
- Live Chat Representative Skills
For online chat representatives to be successful, they must focus on delivering a personalized experience to the customers and maintaining the human element online. They must be well-trained to:
- Represent the brand online and build company reputation
- Keep the shoppers engaged through a meaningful conversation flow
- Cross-sell and up-sell products by using videos, links, etc.
- Provide to-the-point responses to customers in a single chat session
- Resolve customer complaints efficiently and quickly to facilitate sales
- Adhere to the company’s information security protocols
- Metrics to measure ROI
As you are deploying a new channel to manage customer experience, it is important to develop the right set of metrics to measure its impact. Thus, it is important to measure:
- ‘First Contact Resolution’ to determine how effective real-time chat is over emails
- ‘Cost-per-contact’ by comparing the cost of service across different channels like phone and email
- ‘Average Value of Order’ to ascertain the skills of chat executive in up-selling and cross-selling products/ services
- ‘Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate’ to compare sale of products/ services, before and after live chat deployment
- ‘Sales Conversion Rate’
- ‘Customer Satisfaction Rate’ to gauge the effectiveness of the chat session
Benefits of Providing Live Chat Support to Customers
Boost Consumer Engagement: Online chat is an effective and efficient tool to answer customer queries and deliver them a satisfying shopping experience. You can also use visually-appealing live chat graphics to greet visitors and provide them round-the-clock assistance.
Cut Down on Expenses: Online chat is cheaper as compared to answering queries through phone calls at a contact center.
Increase Sales: When you answer customer queries instantly, you not only reduce shopping cart abandonment rate but also use it as a platform to up-sell and cross-sell and, consequently boost sales.
Increase Operational Efficiency: Live chat results in increased operational efficiency by allowing the representatives to handle multiple chats simultaneously.
Gather Data for Customer Analytics: When a visitor engages with you through online chat, you get their details including location, keywords used, etc., using which you can create a data repository and gain valuable insights from research and analytics.
Certainly, a well-planned live chat strategy can help businesses improve their customer’s online experience. However, delivering a seamless shopping experience to customers via chat support calls for in-depth expertise. A partner like SunTec India – holding a wealth of experience in delivering back-office support services including phone and chat support can help you implement an effective live chat strategy and manage customer interactions while boosting conversion rates.
Get in Touch for 24/7 Live Chat Support!
Our team of online chat representatives works round-the-clock to manage customer queries received via mail as well as live chat in real-time. To know more, drop us a line at info@suntecindia.com.
