6 Ways Your Business Can Benefit From Adding Live Chat Support For Website

Originally published on Provide Support Blog on February 27, 2015 By Maria Lebed.

There are many challenges that new as well as established entrepreneurs have to face while setting up and growing their website and trying to make it more profitable. Among the variety of different tools designed to help the entrepreneur to meet those challenges, live chat support for website is one of the tools which help to win more customers and establish a stronger connection with them – a goal valid for the whole lifespan of an enterprise.
How exactly is live chat able to assist your business growth? Below are the 6 benefits you will instantly recognize after adding live support to your website and making your website visitors and existing customers aware of the contact option available to them.
How quickly you can see the results will depend on creating a greater level of awareness of the availability of the new customer service channel among your clients and encouraging them to use this support option. Many websites, unfortunately, make the mistake of hiding the live chat feature in one of the internal pages of their website, which makes it hard to find for the customers and diminishes the benefits of this tool considerably.
6 Ways Live Chat Support Can Stimulate Your Business Growth
1. Brings More Traffic to Your Website or Blog
Not all business owners who decided to use live chat support are aware that besides placing the chat button on their website pages they can also include their chat messenger link in their email signature, share it on social media, distribute on forums and any other online platforms where they maintain their business presence.
Giving the customers a convenient contact option along with engaging information can increase interest in the website and become a great source of additional traffic.
2. Converts More Leads into Paying Customers
One of the major reasons customers abandon their online shopping carts are often related to complications and confusion at checkout. Confused customers may need instant help to be able to complete their purchase. Live chat support give this ability to a business to provide real-time help to customers, answer their questions and concerns during the sales process, which leads to increased conversions and sales.
3. Breeds Customer Loyalty
According to Edigital research, live chat has the 73% customer satisfaction rate – the highest of all customer service channels. Satisfied customer, who has had a positive service experience with a company, is more likely to overlook smaller issues that may arise and stay with the company throughout good and bad times.
For many businesses who are just starting out and trying to establish good reputation, providing live support assistance and showing 24/7 availability to address customers’ needs, helps to create trust with prospective clients and win their loyalty over time.
4. Improves Customer Retention Rates
For most businesses it is a proven fact that existing customers bring the most revenue. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% against 5-20% probability of selling to a new customer. For this reason building a strong relationship with clients who made a purchase and encouraging them to purchase again is one of the important business goals.
The stats show live chat can help to increase customer retention significantly. According to eMarketer report, 63% of respondents who chatted said they were more likely to return to the site, and 62% reported being more likely to purchase from the site again.
5. Reduces Customer Service Costs
The cost of a single live chat interaction is one of the cheapest compared to other customer support channels. Gartner found that live chat costs just about 1/4th that of a phone transaction, while Forrester provided the figures of $10 per live chat session against $33 per phone service transaction.
Additional source of cost reduction is in less manpower required to provide live support service, as a single agent can manage multiple chat sessions at the same time.
Technically wise also, live chat is easy to add to your website, especially if you purchase a cloud-based solution where all the software is hosted on the servers of the service provider.
6. Extends Your Partnerships and Affiliations
By maintaining strong online presence and transparency of your business, allowing easy contact with your website support team, you will increase trust to your business by other companies and will attract more partnership offers and expose your business to greater opportunities.
Additionally, if you join the affiliate program for live chat you can tap into the potential of creating great connections with the clients of your clients and not only increase your current revenue, but also to lay a base for future projects, for expanding your business offers and services.
Have you considered adding live chat support to your website? What are the major drawbacks for you in deciding to make this investment? We welcome you to share your thoughts and experience with us.
Maria Lebed
Maria is a Customer Service Advocate and Social Media Coordinator at Provide Support, LLC. She is a writer and blogger on customer experience, customer service innovation and live chat support service.