A live chat tool is one of the fastest and handiest channels to get in touch with a company representatives, and more and more businesses implement these tools on their websites or apps. In a lot of ways it’s more convenient than using the traditional means of communication: phone or email. It combines advantages of both these channels without having most of their drawbacks.
Basically live chat software works like this: you add a code snippet into the code of your website (or install a plugin or app for your platform), and it makes a chat window appear. Your website visitors use this window to send you messages, and you reply to them from a special dashboard.
There are many tools on the market with different features, prices and design. Some of the tools are fit for big companies and corporations, some are perfect for small and medium sized businesses.
We launched our own live chat tool — Chatra — back in 2015, and have been working in this field since then. In this blog post we would like to share our knowledge with you and help you understand what having a live chat box on your website means.
So here are 22 facts about live chat software:
1. Chat support is cheaper than phone support. Over the phone one agent can talk only with one customer at a time, but if they are chatting online, one agent can handle several conversations simultaneously without affecting the level of service and the customer experience.
2. Many customers don’t even want to take their time to make a call. The modern technology allows customers to do online shopping anywhere, even in a crowded subway. But if they have questions and have to make a call, it usually requires them to at least find a quiet place with good reception. With live chat they can get a quick reply on the spot, and you will avoid those dreadful questions like “I did not get that, could you repeat what you just said?” or “Could you spell your email address please?”. And if an agent has to check some information, a visitor can do other things while waiting for a reply, instead of awkwardly standing with a phone and listening to “on hold music”.
3. The demand for live chat tools as a support channel is expected to grow 87% in the next year. With more and more businesses implementing them on their website, customers expect to see a live chat feature as a default.
4. Live chat is a powerful sales tool that can significantly improve your conversion rate, if used correctly. Various studies prove this point. According to Blue Soda Promo, 60% of their team’s chats result in a sale. Another research showed that having a live chat widget on the signup page helped Ez Texting increase their signups by 31%. However, everything depends on what kind of website you have and how exactly you are using a live chat tool. You’ll get the best results if you set up proactive chat invitations and reply to messages in a timely and friendly manner.
5. If you don’t have enough time or team members to provide live chat support to all your customers, you can offer this channel only to certain types of customers or only on certain pages. For example, you can make it accessible only by your VIP customers, or place the chat button only on pages where fast response will make a difference (like cart and checkout pages, or your top exit pages). The majority of live chat tools allow you to set conditions for showing or hiding the widget, or you can simply add the widget code only on the required pages.
6. The expected response time for live chat and for email is very different. According to the research, when customers contact companies by email, the majority of them expect a reply within 24 hours or less. And the optimal response time for online live chat interactions is less than a minute, and some customers may even leave your website if they have to wait for a reply for more than 2 minutes.
7. But you don’t even have to be available 24/7. Modern live chat solutions like Chatra or Intercom set expectations and collect information from visitors by employing bots that can engage visitors and route their message to the correct department. Moreover, the bot can ask visitors to specify their question, which is very useful when your live chat works in an offline messenger mode and the visitor shouldn’t expect an immediate reply. Thanks to the bot, you’ll be able to reply to the questions at your own pace and not deal with meaningless “Hello, are you there?” messages.
When you are only starting your business, it’s impossible to be available all the time, and hiring a dedicated person who’ll cover the night shift might be too expensive. Moreover, working at night can ruin your health. Set the reasonable working hours for the time you can be readily available to your customers and use the chat bot to let them know when they can expect a reply when you are offline.
8. According to the survey, the majority of agents (70%) can handle 2-3 conversations simultaneously, and 22% of support agents can handle 4-5 conversations. Of course this number may vary, and if agents get asked the same questions, they can use canned responses and reply to more chats. But usually if an agent has more than 3 conversations at a time, the quality of their conversations suffer: they may accidentally give customers inaccurate information or make them wait for too long. This in turn can negatively impact the customer satisfaction.
9. Live chat communication is usually less formal than email communication. However, agents should adapt their tone and style to the customer. If a customer is using formal language, it makes sense to reply with formal phrases as well. If a customer sends you emojis and jokes around, sending an emoji back won’t hurt. And if a customer is obviously not a native English speaker, use simpler sentences and avoid slang and expressions that may be hard to understand.
10. Live chat increases the customer satisfaction thanks to its availability and convenience. 63% of customers say that they are willing to come back to a website where they received support via the live chat software, and an immense proportion of customers (90%!) deems live chat helpful. They don’t have to spend time looking for a way to contact you: with proactive chat invitations help comes to them instead.
11. Live chat can be a great addition to your knowledge base or the help section. Add a chat button to those pages and let your customers contact you if they didn’t find the answer to their question or if they have troubles understanding the article.
12. It’s also a great way to gain feedback and identify weak spots and problems. You can use website analytic tools (like Google Analytics) to see on what pages customers usually start a conversation, and also you can analyze the conversations themselves. Maybe the form your customers have to fill is too complicated, or the article in the help section is not clear enough, or certain links are hard to find. For example, we noticed that our customers often asked us if we had desktop or mobile apps and where to download them. It means that it’s hard to find the links on our landing page. So we added the links to the footer, and now we get less “Where can I download your app?” types of questions.
13. Millenials prefer live chat to other support channels. 58% of millenials would rather text a company than make a call, and using a live chat box is a perfect way to get a fast reply to their question instead of making a dreadful phone call and waiting on the line. In the United States alone, millenials are already spending about $600 billion annually and are expected to be spending $1.4 trillion by the year 2020, so ignoring their preferences can cost companies dearly.
14. According to the research, the industries with the lowest customer satisfaction ratings are: public transportation, utility, broadband and media, public services, and insurance. If your business is connected to one of these industries, providing excellent live chat support can make your company stand out against your competitors.
15. Chatbots will not replace human agents anytime soon. It may be tempting to pay for a bot once and let it handle customer support for you, being available 24/7 and not having to take any bathroom or lunch breaks. But with the current state of AI, bots are not able to provide the level of support that your customers deserve. Also they lack empathy and will not be able to deal with an upset customer the same way a human can. Moreover, you’ll have to spend a lot of time preparing the knowledge base for the bot and making sure it’s relevant and up to date.
16. More than 30% of customers expect to see a live chat feature on a website, and for mobile visitors this number goes up to 62%. But only 9% of websites actually use live chat tools, according to the research.
17. Automatic chat invitations are annoying, if used incorrectly, but can make a huge difference to your conversion rate, if used correctly. The main mistakes that live chat software users are making are: sending an auto-message as soon as a visitor lands on the page, using generic phrases, and showing too many proactive invitations during one browser session. The correct way to use this feature is: add delays to let your customers look around first, use different conditions and customize texts for different pages and occasions, don’t be too pushy, and don’t send new auto-messages to visitors who rejected a chat invitation earlier.
18. You don’t necessarily have to hire a dedicated live chat agent if you don’t have much traffic on your website yet. We know a lot of website owners who chat with customers themselves and see nothing wrong with it.
19. The majority of live chat tools offer mobile apps for Android and iOS, so an agent doesn’t necessarily have to sit in front of a desktop computer for the whole day. You can do other things and go to different places if you need to, and reply to your customers from any place that has some kind of internet connection. If you have Windows Phone or other types of mobile OS, you can still use the web version of the dashboard in the mobile browser, but in this case, you may risk missing chats because there are no notifications.
20. If a customer chatted with you before making a purchase, their average order value goes up by 10%. And generally shoppers who use live chat are worth 4.5 times more than those who do not use it.
21. There’s no need to install anything or switch tabs/apps to chat with you or your agents. Your customers can get support on the spot and won’t have to install anything even if you have to use the screen sharing or co-browsing features. This way they don’t risk downloading some malicious software.
22. Customers return about one third of all internet transactions. With a live chat tool you can help customers choose the right products, and as a result save them from the trouble of having to return the item. It will save your time and money as well.
To sum it up, live chat is a great tool to build a connection with your potential customers and strengthen it with the existing ones. It helps you understand your customers better, gather valuable feedback, increase the conversion rate, and show that there’s a human behind your brand. It has some drawbacks but is still much better than providing support over the phone or by email only.
The popularity of live chat tools keeps growing, and new tools keep appearing on the market. You can choose the right tool for your website based on the pricing, functionality, and design. The majority of services offer a free trial period, so you can test everything before spending any money or even use the free plan if you are only starting your business.
We believe Chatra is a great choice for small and medium-sized businesses, so if you decide to add a live chat widget to your website, give us a try!