Few aspects of your business are more important than good customer service. The longer you keep clients around – and the happier you make them – the stronger your business becomes.
And it begins from the very first touch – the moment a prospect arrives on your website. If you can capture their attention and help solve their problems, you increase the likelihood that they become a client for good.
The easiest way to do this is with a good live chat interface. But getting started can be a big hurdle.
To help convince you, we’ve identified 6 key signs that installing a live support widget will definitely make an important contribution to your bottom line and boost your customer satisfaction levels.
This post will be useful for e-commerce, SaaS business owners, freelance professionals, and any business or institution with an online presence.
So what are the indicators your website is crying for a good live chat?
1. Abandoned carts/checkout pages & uncompleted signups or installations
These mean visitors feel lost or are hesitant about completing the desired action.
Use a live chat with proactive triggers (for instance, HelpCrunch, Olark or Zendesk Chat) and resolve their doubts on the spot.
AMA report shows that visitors who engage in a live chat, are 3 times more inclined to buy. Live support allows for a real-time personal interaction with shoppers, which raises the probability that they will buy.
Use analytics (Google Analytics is free to install) to determine at which moments people bounce from completing crucial actions and act with a tailored proactive message before that happens next time.
Let’s say you detect that on average those people who don’t convert spend 20 seconds on a certain page without doing anything, so trigger a proactive message earlier. e.g. after 10 or 15 seconds.
Abandoned cart
This is a sign that a customer may be confused by the product description on your site, shipping costs, return policy, or simply is searching for a better deal. First, with a live chat, the visitors can contact you and tell you about their uncertainties. Or you can step in and relieve all potential doubts and/or encourage customers with a discount.
Abandoned checkout
People may be simply unsure how to complete the payment or worry about their data security. Offer to walk them through the buying process, answering questions along the way.
Some companies use email follow-ups to save abandoned carts but it’s much more effective to “strike when the iron is hot” and the visitor is still on your site.
Uncompleted signup
One of the top concerns during signup is the fear of automatic billing or data breach. Live support can help you clear these doubts for people, by giving further information.
Tip
It’s better not to ask for the credit card details during the registration – it deters a lot of potential customers because they are anxious about giving their sensitive data to brands they don’t know well.
Uncompleted installation
In the case of a multi-step installation wizard, use analytics to detect which step takes a long time and shows a higher bounce rate – and offer a helping hand.
2. You’re a software startup and need to validate your growth strategy
If you recently launched, you usually don’t know exactly what questions clients will want to ask you or which features they require most.
This is the best time to use live help as it provides you with direct access to their opinions and concerns plus it is the fastest way you can talk to your clients at scale (you can speak on a phone with just one person while the chat lets you talk to a number of people at the same time).
Collect feature requests, customer feedback, bug reports, monitor people’s reactions to your pricing policy, check if your value proposition is clear and whether your site needs improvement.
Choose a chat widget with unlimited chat history where all interactions with a given person are stored in the same thread for easy access.
Such human conversations will help you identify the real needs of your clients, react promptly and point you in the right direction as you work to optimize your products, services and marketing planning.
Tip. Make sure you’re listening to the right people, i.e. your paying clients. They are interested in the long-term value of your product and give relevant feedback.
3. You’re a freelance entrepreneur
You work on your own and you don’t have a dedicated support team.
Live chat lets you comfortably do support yourself, make useful connections, market your products – and all this with great flexibility.
You can give a vital personal touch to your clients without being detached from your working routine as a live chat makes multi-tasking possible.
The same is valid for your customers:
51% of consumers favor live chat for the possibility of multi-tasking and 21% say they appreciate live chat because it allows them to shop while they work (eConsultancy report).
And whenever you’re too busy to talk, just hide the widget from your website. You can also set operating hours and the widget will automatically switch on and off depending on your settings.
Alternatively, when you’re not available, you can activate an offline form with a message inviting people to provide their contact details and leave their message to follow up later via email. There are live chat providers who allow this multi-channel communication, e. g. HelpCrunch.
One more asset of a live chat is that it lets you talk to people from your mobile, wherever you are.
4. You know too little about people on your website
Live chat lets you collect and analyze important insights about your onsite visitors to better identify your customer persona and foster your acquisition and targeting efforts.
For instance, you can track:
- A visitor’s current page and session duration, which pages he/she visited before
- Their first and last visit times
- The link that referred the visitor to your site
- The operating system and the kind of device the customer is on
- Their geographic location
If you integrate your product with a live chat, you can track even more advanced parameters, like amount paid, type of subscription, tariff etc
All of this live visitor monitoring helps you get closer than ever to your audience.
5. You offer a complex product or service
If you offer a complex product with multiple functionalities, add-ons, integrations, options, and pricing plans – you definitely need live support.
Even if your FAQ section or site is brilliant, people will still have questions.
Utilize live chat to engage and onboard users, help fine-tune your features to their business case and teach them how to get the most of your product by talking in real-time.
Resolve an issue faster by sending screenshots right in the chat, share explainer videos or send them a link to a relevant section in your knowledge base or explain the issue directly in chat.
If the same question pops up very often – you can build a base of pre-made answers (aka saved responses) and quickly pick the right one when needed straight from the chat.
Econsultancy study states that 79% of customers consider the availability of a live help very useful because they get their requests handled immediately.
Determine which pages people linger for a longer time and fire proactive messages. These can be certain sections of your help docs, specific product descriptions, your API section, etc. Pricing page also often generates lots of questions, especially if you offer tiered pricing, custom pricing or usage-based pricing.
Engage those who visit your website repeatedly but don’t complete any action – they’re interested in your product but something stops them from going further.
Tip. Don’t bombard people with proactive messages for all pages of your website, or they will get annoyed. Use analytics and pick several critical moments.
6. You sell expensive products
When customers make a bigger investment, like buying electronics, furniture or even expensive clothes, they want to be 100% secure that your product is worth it before trusting you with their money. And the availability of fast and ideally 24h support is often a deciding factor.
Let them ask all their questions, express their reservations and concerns, have all their doubts cleared and help them take a well-weighted decision.
J.D. Power discovered that live chat has become the leading communication tool in digital marketing, as 42% of clients get in touch via live chat as opposed to just 23% who opt for email, and 16% for social networks or forums.
Example from the Ambassador watch boutique:
The possibility to talk to a real person whenever assistance is needed is very reassuring and will help you build credibility and trust.
To sum up, live chat is a great tool to improve visitor engagement, sales, and support. Especially for businesses where building strong customer relationships is an absolute must for successful development and growth.
