Live chat is essential to giving your customers the best web experience

Increase sales and improve customer service with Live Chat.

Live chat is quickly becoming a preferred choice of communication for customers online. It’s an easy way to engage customers while they are on your website, view live interaction with your pages and help guide your customers through the purchase process. Having the best user experience on your website will provide the competitive advantage you need online, and live chat is an essential to providing this experience.

Customers love to chat

According to e-consultancy over 65% of Americans have engaged in live chat while shopping online. When asked their preferred form of communication Live Chat (21%) was almost equivalent to phone calls (23%). This simply translates to: most people have done it and enough people prefer it to show it’s essential to your website. If 1/5 of your customers prefer to chat online; your competition could easily snatch them up by offering this form of communication. That is a huge number!

Chat is efficient for you (and your customers)

Chat lets you multi-task. You can chat with multiple customers at once, while keeping the phone lines free for inbound callers. Phone calls are attention hogs; if you are trying to multi-task while speaking to a customer… they will know! This isn’t the same with chat. While your customer is taking the time to read your response, view a link and respond… there is time to engage with another customer. This allows for your team to give every customer the attention they deserve.

The same goes for your customers. They may be working or distracted while on your website and this allows them to multi-task as well. Chatting lets them browse without the pressure of needing to continuously be occupied by a phone conversation. Chat sessions can continue even during silence. This allows them to literally have you at their fingertips while they read, shop, watch and browse your website.

Live chat converts more customers

Customers spend up to 40% more time on your site while chatting based on data from Olark. They are 3x more likely to return and 15% more likely to complete the checkout process when there is a live chat available. Essentially, when giving your customers the option to chat; they are going to stick around and buy. They are comfortable and feel great knowing you are there to help with just a simple click.

Chatting is traceable

Recording all of your phone calls and listening to them is nearly impossible. It’s too time consuming! However, this is easy with your live chat software. You can read transcripts to see what happened. You can see what pages your customers visited and which ones caused them to interact with your live chat module. PHP Live offers and easy chat transcript module and customer ratings. In the admin section of their software you can view chats by ratings (1-5 stars). You can then contact the customer again via email and help to rectify a poor customer service experience. You gain valuable data with every chat.

There are many companies that offer live chat and most of them are extremely cost effective (some are even free). Pick the chat module that is right for your company; don’t neglect having it. Chat can work on your mobile device, can plug into any website and is generally simple to use. The real kicker is that it is proven to improve customer service and increase sales… shouldn’t that be enough?

Colman and Company has embraced live chat to better serve our customers. Visit us online and feel free to say hi!