A close look at the history of successful businesses will reveal that corporate battles have been won and lost not purely on the basis of critical factors such as the amount of investment that transforms a business idea into reality, or even the privilege of setting up shop in under-served markets. Innovation and business strategy have also played an important role in a business’s success. Google is a stellar example of this hypothesis. When managing your online business, you should consider opportunities for growth that are fueled by a clearly defined business strategy. Top-notch customer support, of which live chat is an integral part, can provide your company with a platform not merely to articulate effective business strategy, but also to implement it.
So, how can live chat support on your website help you race ahead of your competitors? Read below to find out.
Make Live Chat a Priority
Simply signing up for a feature-rich live chat functionality and implementing it on your website is no longer enough. You should consider giving live chat a high level of priority among all the service channels your contact center may be using. Priority status involves training your chat reps in the various features and attributes of the live support application you have chosen, empowering them with the product and domain knowledge to handle customer queries, and most importantly, streamlining your chat service to ensure that your customers and website visitors experience zero wait times.
Implement a Two-way Mobile Chat Solution
This is truly the age of smartphones. Consumers now spend more time interacting with online businesses on their smartphones than they do on their desktops. Your website, therefore, not only needs to be responsive (meaning that it should be fully accessible on a smartphone), but live chat should function without a hitch. Your reps should be able to respond to chat inquiries from their smartphones so that service is never interrupted — even if they walk away for a few minutes for a coffee break. If your live support software has a mobile interface, you should activate it, test it, and ask all your chat reps to use it while they are checked in.
Review your Analytics
The analytics features of live chat applications have come a long way in recent years. We recommend asking your live chat service provider to send you a briefing document about the various analytics features built into your application. It is a good idea to use these features, since you are already paying for them. When combined with your CRM, analytics data can even generate in-depth customer profiles to help you better understand customer behavior and leverage this data to plan ahead.
Review Chat Transcripts
Chat transcripts, which should be generated by the chat application you have implemented, can reveal a substantial amount of information not only about your customers, but also about your service reps. You may want to integrate randomly selected transcripts into your training schedule while training your reps. You will be able to assess the quality of responses, as well as customer buying habits. You can even set up a chat transcript library for your reps as a valuable training resource.
Several studies have demonstrated that the cost of delivering customer service through live chat is significantly less than phone or email. Therefore, a strategy that places live chat ahead of other service channels will not only raise the bar of the quality of customer support you render to your customers, but it will also allow you to do so affordably.
Implementing Live Chat for Your Website in Bloomington, Illinois
Live chat is an excellent means to improve customer service and sales. So, if you want to get the most out of your online presence, incorporating live chat into your online business strategy is the way to go. If your business is located in Bloomington, Illinois, and if you’re interested in having live chat capabilities on your website, please feel free to contact us today.