Driving traffic to your website is hard. Making them stay is even harder. Your products may excel, your web design may stand out. But chances are, people are opting out of your site just because your instant support is nowhere to be found. Like any brick-and-mortar store, an online shop can barely function well without a virtual real-time salesman. It’s not the kind of man behind the e-mailbox, who takes hours to respond. Nor the man over the phone, who can only be reached after wading through those infuriating automated phone trees. It must be a live chat agent, who tends to customers’ needs in a jiffy.
Live chat support, therefore, is more favored than other communication channels as phone or email. Customers get prompt answers and stay happy, while store owners gain more leads, close more sales and build more trust with their prospects. In today’s post, we will focus on 7 reasons why live chat solution is definitely a huge plus for your online business.

1, Reduce bounce rate

Bounce rate or Exit rate is a metric representing the quality of your site traffic. It stings to have 60% of your hard-earned visitors bounce off the site on their first visit. A high bounce rate not only hurts sales but your site ranking on search engines as well. You can get rid of this high metric by improving the site’s content or usability to engage visitors. It takes time, though.

A faster workaround is to implement a live chat tool. Take Subiz live chat solution for example. Its Smart triggers feature helps craft draft messages and automatically send them out once certain conditions are triggered. So here comes the knowledge bomb. List down every page with high bounce rate on your site. Go to your Triggers management, add a new trigger for shooting chat invitation to any visitor landing on one of those high-bounce-rate pages. A simple “May I help you?” or “What’ve you been looking for?” before your prospect has the chance to click away may earn you a potential lead.

2, Improve customer service

Customers love live chat. That’s the finding from eDigital’s survey in 2013, in which 73% of those who were asked, said they preferred live chat than phone, email, SMS, social media, etc. This makes up the highest satisfaction level among all customer service channels. Wonder why?

Firstly, live chat ensures timely interaction that a ticket or email system forever lack. People are always in a hurry. No one is patient enough to sit down and write an email just asking for available colors of a coat. Secondly, live chat tool as Subiz covers on-the-move chatting with its support for a variety of 3rd party IM softwares integrated on smartphones or tablets. Thirdly, customer’s history and activity are recorded for better support in the future. All these considered, live chat is no doubt a must-have support solution for a customer-driven business.

3, Increase conversions and sales

How your live chat agent interact with a visitor places a huge impact on his/her buying decision. Tip for securing the deal is to choose the right approach and leave the best impression. Subiz live chat makes this easier than ever. Its monitoring feature presents an overview of every visitor’s background; from their city, IP to their web path, web browser, time on site, etc. An agent can use this information to chat with a prospect in their own context, then decide on the right offer to give. It could be a coupon code, an up-selling or cross-selling opportunity to improve sales and conversion rate.

Here are some stats for thoughts. 63% were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat, according to a survey by eMarketer. And a Subiz customer found his conversion rate increased significantly by 25% after installing Subiz live chat for the first time.

4, Cost effective

Setting up a live chat solution is quicker and less costly than implementing a help desk system or call center. While a phone operator can serve only one customer at a time, a live chat agent can handle multiple concurrent chats, thereby reducing human resources expenses.

Live chat agents can be grouped by department to increase efficiency and responsibility. Impatient customers will no longer have to wait on hold for half an hour, just to get someone on the line who has no idea about their issue.

5, Keep track of visitor’s activities

Live chat tool helps store owners monitor their visitors’ activities on site and assess their support team’s performance. Subiz, for example, releases reports every week, month or a custom period of time on the number of chats, visitors, page views, etc. These statistics can be filtered by agent to measure each staff’s work rate in comparison with the whole team.

6, Collect priceless customer feedbacks

You throw out lengthy survey forms to thousands of users? You sit and pray, in hope that some of them may have enough patience to go through the tedious filling process and finally grant you a short response? Scratch this outdated approach. Site owners can make use of triggers and chat invitation in a live chat tool instead, to kick off a friendly conversation and start gathering customer feedbacks more efficiently.

7, Develop customer trust and loyalty

Doing business is not just about selling, but about gaining trust and long-term relationships as well. People tend to feel more confident and at ease purchasing at a site where a real human is available 24/24 to guide them through the searching or checkout process. As long as their experience stays pleasant, chances are they would come back more often.

Using live chat also improves your site’s transparency. Chat scripts are recorded and can be emailed to both visitors and chat agents. Should there be any disagreement or misunderstanding, those documents can be used to solve the dispute.

A happy customer is a repeat customer. Your support service is currently somewhere between “fine” and “acceptable”? Take it up a notch by simply improving your live chat system and make sure your customers stay happy both before and after the sales.

Did we miss anything in the list? Feel free to comment and Try Subiz today to experience all perks this live chat tool brings.

Try Subiz for Free Now