Companies from around the web are competing to deliver the best shopping experience for their customers, with one particular application giving them a significant edge. We’re talking about live chat of course. However, despite the many benefits of deploying a live chat solution, companies are still hesitant to take the first step, either because they cannot determine a potential ROI pre-deployment, or because they cannot arrive at a justifiable ROI post-deployment.
1. Evaluate Your Business’ Needs
To start, you want to find out how live chat can fit into your existing business strategy, and how its potential benefits measure against existing channels. Will it reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, improve sales, or generate leads? The best way to answer these questions is to launch a pilot project and measure its impact against your current strategy. If the result is positive, you can develop the new system and scale up your activities.
2. Pick the Right Platform
Once the business needs have been evaluated, it’s time to select the right live chat platform. A mistake at this point can have a drastic impact on customer satisfaction and ROI. You will have to decide whether you want to host your own platform, or use a third-party cloud based platform. Should it be reactive or proactive? Should it include a passive assist, or an active assist method?
On top of that, you want a platform that includes features such as transaction history, chat transcripts and other analytic capabilities. You will want data security features, encryption, typing notification, and even quality of life features such as the ability to change the font size. You will want to be able to push customer satisfaction surveys at the end of each session, and of course, the platform has to be scalable, sustainable, and dynamic enough to allow for innovative add-ons post-deployment.
3. Complement Your Existing Funnel
Live chat is a complementary feature on your website, and it should not clash with the main method of making a purchase. Most of your users are probably looking to make a purchase fast, with some of them requiring support along the way. This means that your live chat should not get in the way. Instead, you want to use it to target specific dropout points in the sales process, sales trigger points, and specific problem areas on your website. You also want to use live chat to up-sell and cross-sell. The key here is to augment and complement your existing sales funnel, and to allow customers to self-serve for the most part.
4. Manage the Expected UX
Live chat is all about the user experience. You want the interaction to be informal enough so that it feels comfortable for your users, but you also want to maintain a certain standard of quality that reflects well on your brand. To achieve this balance, you will need to train your chat agents properly. Their main focus should be to reduce the customer effort in the purchasing process, facilitating the experience, and maintaining a personalized interaction with each client. To do this, an agent should be trained to build rapport with the customer, engage in a meaningful conversation flow, provide short, poignant responses, manage customer pain points and provide a seamless experience. The agent must also learn how to comply with information security protocols, represent the brand online, and manage conversations on various chat forums.
Implement Live Chat for Your Company
If you are interested in implementing live chat in Schaumburg, Digital Destination can help you out, with everything from strategy to deployment. Contact us today for more information.