Beyond sales and customer service, live chat is a great tool for onboarding, soliciting product feedback, increasing customer engagement, and getting to know your customers better overall. Let’s take a closer look at how you can make each of those happen.

More use cases for live chat

In addition to providing standard customer service or identifying sales leads, consider utilizing a chat tool for the following reasons too:

• Onboarding New Users. People who are brand-new to using your product or service are likely to have questions and need your help getting started. Plus, poor onboarding is one of the top reasons for churn - by not getting involved early, you might be setting your customers up for failure down the road. This is the perfect time to implement a high-touch relationship with them. Not only will you be able to answer their questions in a timely manner, but you’ll also establish a solid relationship and build customer loyalty. This kind of customer interaction is the perfect time to answer all of their “how do I…?” type questions as they get started and set them off on the right foot. It’s also the perfect time to make sure they see the value of your product and offer any tips and tricks they may need for their particular use case.
• During Technical Setup. If your product or service requires a fairly technical setup at some point, offering live chat to hold a user’s hand along the way is critical, especially if they’re likely to be a less technical person in general. By helping them through the trickier process, you’ll build their confidence in your product and support, as well as help them move to more advanced areas more quickly.
• Product Feedback. Wondering what your customers think of a new feature or how they feel about your product as a new user? Ask! Identify a group of users who are more likely to have the answers you need and use live chat to connect with them and gather the data you need.
• Customer Engagement. Do you notice a customer lingering in a certain spot on your site for a long time or do have a lot of customers who access your site from their mobile devices? These are the perfect people to start up a chat with and establish a relationship. People are used to chatting with friends over messaging, so many will be keen to chat with you too. Keep it casual and friendly: offer help or insight but go away if they want you to.

Teams That Can Benefit From Chat

From sales to customer service, marketing, and beyond, your business is full of teams that can find benefits in using live chat. Keep reading for which ones and how.

Sales

Whether your sales team is focused on enterprise-level sales, upselling travel packages or running your eCommerce setup, live chat can help. With Chatra, you can invite potential customers or browsing shoppers to open a chat anytime, or reach out to them directly yourself. The ability to directly interact with a customer will help prevent losing them to confusion or frustration and get them over the first hurdles to deciding to spend their money with your business. Think of this as your chance for your in-store sales clerk to approach a customer and offer help. The key is to be there when they need you, but not bug them so much they want to leave. The effort is worth it and the results are clear: 79% of businesses say offering chat positively impacted their sales, revenue, and customer loyalty. Plus, over a third of customers are more likely to spend money on a website if it has live chat support.

Customer Service

Chances are, you’re selling something and you need people to buy it. Customer service over live chat is essential. According to Forrester, 83% of online shoppers report needing help at some point during the purchase process and over half of them will abandon their cart if they can’t find an answer to their question quickly. Whether it’s a new customer looking to make a purchase or an existing user who needs some help, providing customer service over live chat is a fantastic way to make more sales and improve customer happiness.

Product

Is your product team in need of ways to get feedback directly from customers or ask them questions to achieve a better understanding of how people use your tools? Anyone who’s supported software or an online service knows customers are full of feedback they want to share and chat is the answer for your product team to receive it. Identify users — whether new or experienced — who may have insights the team could use and reach out to them for a chat. While not every request or complaint will result in a change for your product or service, compiling data from customers can be very beneficial as your product team addresses existing issues and maps out their plans for the future.

Marketing

Wondering how customers or potential customers feel about your marketing efforts? Ask them. Live chat is a great spot to conduct user interviews or ask for feedback on marketing. For example, put a chat box on your pricing page to understand whether your value proposition is convincing prospects or falling flat. You may also want to use it to simply get to know your customers better too. The more you understand who they are, the better you’ll be able to target them with your marketing and serve them with your products in general.