7 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Web Chat

⏱ Reading Time: 8 minutes

In today’s business climate, remote customer support is everything. People that visit your website for the first time can’t judge the quality of your products or services immediately, but they can judge your customer support quality. If you have trouble converting leads on your website, the reason could be lackluster customer support. 

 🚀Read: Omnichannel Guide for Digitally Advanced Brands🚀

Customers that can’t get quick answers to their questions are less likely to linger on a page. For this reason, many businesses have started to implement web chat options on their websites. That live chat button on the corner of a page can do wonders for conversions and improving the customer support experience. What’s even better is that it can also provide other benefits for your business. 

Here are a few reasons to consider implementing web chat on your website.

1. It Provides Customers With Instantaneous Answers

Customers aren’t known for being patient. When they want products, services, or answers, they want them immediately. While they can’t get the first two instantly while online shopping, answers can be easy to come by if you have the right tools.

The speed at which we can communicate over social media and email is astonishing. For that reason, speed is a standard that customers will expect when communicating with your business. So, what do you do when a user wants to pose a question about your products or services?

The quickest and most efficient way to get their attention is through website real-time chat. Once a user asks a question in the live chat, a customer support representative can reply while the visitor is still on the website. This shows customers that you take your client service seriously and that you want to help them as quickly as possible. It’s almost certain that they’ll appreciate the gesture and respect your business a bit more. Plus, they’ll get the answer they’ll need and possibly buy one of your products based on it.

2. Live Web Chat Enables International Customer Support

A 24/7 live chat service opens up your communication options significantly. If you’re aiming for an international audience, web chat is essential.

You want to be available to customers whenever they happen to visit your website. Using email or a phone line won’t cut it. People don’t want to shuffle between their email and a website that they’re browsing. They want instant results and answers to their questions. You’ll find that most shoppers won’t want to make international calls, either. They can be expensive unless you have a customer support office in every large region. With live chat, you can circumvent these downsides and provide customers with convenient answers right away.

Picture 1. Paldesk Live Web Chat Interface

What do you do if a customer doesn’t speak English particularly well? When it comes to phones or emails, you’re mostly out of luck. However, some web chat programs offer translation services. Even if you opt for one that doesn’t, using third-party translation apps like Google translate is a breeze with written text. Your customer service representative will be able to communicate with just about anyone, no matter where they’re located.

3. Crucial Info Is Easy to Come By With Web Chat

Not being able to answer a customer’s question might seem bad, but it’s much better than not getting any questions at all. One of your goals should always be to get as many questions out of customers as you can. Their questions can tell you what users want to know. After getting this information, you can formulate answers ahead of time and keep your customer service team prepared for customer inquiries.

What makes live chat so important for businesses is that all the transcripts are easy to save. You can analyze conversations between users and customer support personnel. Therefore, you can figure out crucial information about customers’ needs. Even if a particular question can’t be answered that day, the info you get will make it easier to answer future customer questions.

The way your personnel interacts with customers is just as important as providing good answers. With the data you have from transcripts, you can create an ideal customer experience. Note what kind of conversation keeps users busy on your website. Later on, you can emphasize the importance of this type of communication to your customer support team and coach them to emulate it.

4. It’s a Cost-Effective Solution

Another reason so many businesses are turning to live web chat is that it’s cost-effective compared to its alternatives. Take call centers for example. You need plenty of employees to respond to customers’ calls efficiently. One of the reasons for this is the fact that a single call will hold up a customer support representative for a while. In another word, the time spent on calls is dedicated just on one customer. Waiting queue times necessitate even more personnel, as callers don’t like to be left waiting for answers.

One of the benefits of live chat services is that personnel can handle multiple chat boxes at the same time. This means you won’t need nearly as many employees to work in customer support. Since there’s no delay or queue, customers don’t feel like they’re being held up. Problems are resolved quickly over chat! This means that a customer support representative can handle a large number of requests in a short time span. As a result, this further reduces the need for more employees.

Implementing web chat isn’t expensive, either. Various offshore and nearshore services have integration programs that can simplify live chat implementation on your website. As a result, you wouldn’t even need to make any HTML adjustments to enable web chat.

5. Customers Prefer Web Chat Options

Nowadays, people are less and less likely to use phone calls to communicate. This doesn’t just apply to personal conversations, either. When shopping, customers want to quickly get their desired products without any extra hassle. Calling a phone line is too much work, especially if it’s an international number and there’s a queue involved.

Customers, especially the younger generation, prefer live chat services for a number of different reasons. Some like the instantaneous answers, while others just want to avoid making a phone call. Explaining a problem or request over text is a lot easier for a lot of people than doing it over the phone. Especially if there’s a language barrier involved.

Read Why Do People Rather Text Than Talk?

Customers are less likely to end a conversation frustrated, and more likely to get the answers they need. In the end, it’s all about providing customers with a good experience—and live chat is the best method to achieve this goal.

 Picture 2. Millennials prefer live chat services 

6. Web Chat Is Convenient For Businesses

Web chat has developed significantly in the past decade. Whether we’re talking about live chat teams or chatbot software, there have been significant improvements in the field during this time.

The difference between older and newer chatbots is like night and day. They’ve become smarter and more interactive, nudging customers towards sales. It’s not uncommon for chatbots to turn first-time visitors into qualified leads.

Although they’ve progressed, chatbots aren’t yet capable of creating organic conversations. This is why many businesses prefer using live chat teams.

However, creating a dedicated live web chat team from scratch is too big of an expense for most businesses. A more effective solution would be to enlist an offshore or nearshore team with web chat experience. There are plenty of options to choose from, as there are companies that provide dedicated teams that can grow with your business and adapt to your customer support philosophy.

When choosing a nearshoring location, there are a few key questions you should ask the companies you interview. Does the team provide the necessary infrastructure and administration to run web chat effectively? Do they have the right level of expertise to handle your customer support needs? If you get positive answers, enlisting the nearshore or offshore team would prove to be a cost-effective solution for your company.

 Picture 3. Benefits of web chat

7. It Provides a Competitive Advantage

No matter which line of work you’re in, standing out to customers is crucial. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to customer service. Customers remember their interactions with representatives and use these experiences to shape their view of your business. With the right approach, you can outdo your competition and provide an ideal customer support experience to your customers.

Once again, this is where web chat shines. Growing businesses often have to deal with a large influx of customers that want their questions answered. Adapting a call center team to this job is difficult and puts you at a disadvantage, which means plenty of potential customers will leave your website unsatisfied with their service. With a web chat team, you can adapt more quickly to explosive growth. Also, you can outdo your competition without investing too many funds for a particular service.

The best part is—you can make significant changes to your web chat service whenever necessary, without delaying support for too long. If the market shifts and you require a new strategy, web chat is easy to adapt, giving you an edge compared to competitors that use call centers.

Conclusion

There’s no shortage of benefits that you can expect from implementing web chat features in your customer support strategy. This method has improved significantly over the years and businesses are scrambling left and right to find chatbots and dedicated teams to utilize. If you want to provide the best experience to your customers, a web chat feature might be just the feature you need.

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“Nick is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged in projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business, and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.”