Using a Live Chat tool online is one of the few effective ways to improve the customer experience. It promotes one-on-one interaction between a potential customer and the customers service representative
It allows companies to receive live and direct negative/positive feedback regarding their products or services.
Businesses that are exclusively online can depend on a Live Chat tool to decrease customer service costs and help move prospects along the sales funnel more smoothly and efficiently.
In order to help shed light on a few questions regarding the use of Live Chat Software, Cloudswave has invited Szymon Klimczak, the Chief Marketing Officer of LiveChat Inc. to share his expertise.
Livechat Inc. is one of the best live chat software available according to the Cloudswave Score.
Szymon Klimczak Q&A:
1. What are the reasons to implement a live chat tool on a website?
There’s no better way to provide fast and reliable customer service. Using live chat, customers can get help directly where they need it – on a company’s website. You don’t have to switch to another channel, e.g. email or phone, to have something sorted out.
For example, if a customer is experiencing payment problems during checkout, all they have to do is to click on the live chat button and start a conversation. An agent will be then able to solve the payment issue, thus saving the sale.
Apart from its speed and reliability, live chat is also a lot cheaper than phone. One agent servicing customers via phone can only talk with one customer at a time. The same agent using live chat can service even up to 6-8 customers at a time, depending on their proficiency.
2. What is the best strategy to successfully adopt a live chat service? Are there any requirements to take into consideration beforehand?
The technical side is fairly basic. All it takes is installing a piece of code on your website and getting the live chat app. It can be done within a few minutes.
After the initial setup, you can start fine-tuning your implementation. You can set up custom invitations that will automatically start chats with visitors when they complete a certain action, e.g. enter checkout. You can also customize your chat to make it look like an integral part of your website.
After a while, you can start optimizing your chat based on the built-in reports and metrics.
The single requirement you need to cover is having someone to answer the chats. Business owners can do it themselves or have dedicated customer service agents chatting with customers. In that case, make sure these people have the right set of customer service skills – you need to keep in mind they will be the faces of your company to the customers!
3. Is Live chat right for everyone or is there a particular type of online business that can use it?
From my experience, any business with a website can benefit from live chat solution. Be it for support, sales, lead generation, online advice – any company with an online presence should give their customers a contact option on their website.
According to our data, we have 20+ industries using our LiveChat for customer service. These include industries like automotive, IT, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, non-profit, marketing. The list keeps growing too. Every now and then we find new, creative implementations of LiveChat, e.g. using it for counseling or spiritual advice.
4. How can live chat be used as a customer retention tool? Can it improve customer satisfaction?
It definitely can. It adds value to your offering. For example, an e-commerce clothing store can use live chat to help customers find what they need. It’s like emulating the shopping experience from the real world online. Once a customer buys something after receiving advice through live chat, there is a high chance the customer will pick the service again.
Customers will approach your business because of your great offering or reasonable price range. They will stay for the great service offered through live chat.
According to our monthly Customer Service Benchmark, companies using LiveChat note an average of 87% in customer satisfaction. This number improves over time as companies learn how customer service affects their business in the long run.
5. How can live chat be used to decrease the Bounce Rate?
If you know which pages are ‘bleeding’ customers, you can do something about it with live chat. First off, you need to check which pages have the highest bounce rates and check how long an average visitor spends on those pages. You can use Google Analytics or similar service for that.
Next, you need to set up an automatic invitation that will ‘catch’ the visitor before they leave. For example, if you see that there is a significant drop in the number of visitors who spend more than one minute on your checkout page, you can set up an invitation that will start a chat with those visitors after 45 seconds.
Such setup gives you a chance to talk with a visitor and resolve any potential problems before the visitors bounces.
6. How can we make chat tools more appealing for visitors?
I’d say that there are two ways: one visual and one personal.
The visual aspect involves customizing your live chat and making it easily available and visible on each part of your website. You can change the color of the chat window, its shape or positioning to best fit your website’s design.
The personal aspect of making live chat more appealing involves showing the visitor that they are conversing with an actual person, not a robot. You can start by customizing the agent’s profile – the photo, name, and title. Apart from the looks, the agents should also act naturally when offering help. This means no scripts and not over-relying on pre-made answers.
7. How can live chat software be used for lead generation?
Just putting a live chat on your website will generate additional leads as visitors who would never call you or write you an email would start using live chat because it is more convenient.
If you are looking for higher quality leads then, once again, the invitations can help you. Let’s say you are launching a few new products and you would like to approach leads interested in those products. You can create invitations for people who have accessed the new products on your website but didn’t make a purchase.
If you are running a marketing campaign for those products, you can connect it with your LiveChat too. Whenever somebody clicks on of your AdWords ads, you can start a chat with the visitor immediately, referring the right product.
8. Have there been studies on the expected increase in conversion rate after adding a live chat tool?
Depending on the type of business or approach used, the conversion rates can vary. However, the general trend is that properly staffed and set up live chat helps with conversion.
For example, Forrester Research reports that Wells Fargo got “high customer satisfaction scores and double-digit increase in converted shoppers” as a result of using live chat.
Our experience ranges from double-digits chat-to-sales conversion with Orange Telecom to a whopping 1000% higher ecommerce conversion from chat over non-chat users in the online furniture store. The results vary and sky is the limit!
9. Could you provide tips on making live chat services adaptable to different businesses?
If you are planning on using LiveChat for support, you should definitely look into which support cases are the most common and prepare for them. For example, you can create pre-made answers (canned responses) to quickly deal with some common questions. The speed of response will be one of the biggest contributing factors for your customers’ satisfaction. You should keep track of it, e.g. through reports, and train your agents to answer as quickly as possible.
When selling with LiveChat, you need to be proactive. You need to make the first step before the customer even thinks about using your live chat. You can do that by customizing your automatic invitations to target undecided visitors (those switching back and forth between similar products) and those who are about to abandon a full cart (if they spend more time than average on the checkout page).
Specific industries will also receive additional benefits from using LiveChat. For example, the Forex industry benefits from being able to easily provide 24/7 service around the globe thanks to the shift-scheduling features and customizable chat window languages. Another great example is the hosting industry which can use LiveChat as an additional security measure. When a visitor starts a chat, the agent sees the visitor’s location and IP address. If it doesn’t match up with the stored records, the agent can suspect a potential fraudulent activity.
The key however is simple – trying. Add live chat to your website, start chatting with customers and take it from there.
10. From your experience, do you think that visitors tend to provide their personal information (name, email, etc.) before getting to chat with customer service representative? Is it better to make providing this type of information mandatory before access to the chat, or do you think it’s better to leave the chat open, and try to ask for it via chat?
Getting the personal details before chat allows the agent to better answer the customers questions and skip the introductory phase of the conversation altogether. If you would end up having to ask for the data to be able to do anything with a case, you might as well make the pre-chat survey mandatory. However, if you don’t need the data outright, you can make it optional and ask for it later if need be.
There are also ways to provide the data more easily. In LiveChat, customers can log in to chat with their Facebook accounts instead of filling a pre-chat survey. It take only a single click and the agent starts a chat with basic information about the visitor.
11. Talk to us a bit more about LiveChat. What is your story?
LiveChat has been founded in 2002. At first, it was an enterprise-class product for corporate clients. After several years we realized that we shouldn’t focus only on the largest companies and started offering a completely new version of the LiveChat application entirely in the SaaS model. A couple of months ago we broke the 10,000 customers mark and now we are getting close to 11,000.
Creating an easy to use, beautiful and powerful application was always at the core of what LiveChat stands for. We wanted to get rid of complexity associated with similar products and create an application that can be used as effectively by small, one-man businesses as by huge corporations.
12. Can we expect any future features or additions to LiveChat?
You definitely can! Our development team is constantly working on keeping our product up to date and creating new features for our customers. One of the latest additions to live chat will be the new mobile chat window, which has been designed to work well on all mobile devices.
There’s something new added to LiveChat every couple of days, so keep an eye on our updates page to get the latest scoop!
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A big thank you goes to Szymon Klimczak for taking the time to answer our questions thoroughly, as well as to the entire LiveChat Inc. team.
We hope that you will have a better understanding of how Live Chat tools work and how you can use them to improve your sales and marketing strategies.
About Szymon Klimczak:
As LiveChat’s CMO, Szymon focuses on expanding product visibility and reach through SEO, integrations, partner programs and more.
Szymon is a Certified Google Adwords Professional and worked in the domain/hosting industry before joining LiveChat in 2006. He earned a master’s degree in international economic relations. In his free time, he’s on the basketball court, follows the NBA on a daily basis, occasionally tweets (@SKlimczak) and writes on the LiveChat blog.
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