These days, companies must offer better and better customer service through multiple channels if they want to satisfy consumer demands. In fact, over the course of the past few years, with the development of new technologies and nearly continuous access to the internet thanks to cell phones, the demands and consumer behavior of internet users have evolved.
It’s no longer enough for a company to be reachable by telephone during regular business hours in order to answer questions from current or prospective clients! As the owner of a small, medium or large business, you have to offer a customer experience that’s positive, pleasant and efficient to ensure the happiness and satisfaction of your clientele. This is how you will grow your sales, by augmenting the conversion rates in your online store and increasing consumer awareness of your brand.
Did you know that, in comparison with other companies in the same market, companies that offer a better customer experience earn revenues that are four to eight percent higher? Check out our article from the month of April, where you will discover several different solutions to help you increase customer satisfaction and your bottom line.
Today, internet users are impatient; they want an immediate response if they have a question about a product or service. According to Salesforce, 64 percent of customers prefer to make purchases from companies that can address their needs in real time.
To facilitate interactions between your prospects and your company and thereby improve the customer experience, you can install a live chat system or chatbot on your website. These two tools address different needs, but they complement each other beautifully.
Live chat
Live chat enables you to interact with visitors to your website (current and prospective clients) in real time. In other words, clients immediately get the answers and assistance they want and need. That’s why customers indicate an 85-percent satisfaction rate with live chat!
Live chat offers countless possibilities: you can use it to answer questions, schedule service appointments, sell products, offer promotional codes, assist clients with the purchasing process, and more.
For 41 percent of consumers, live chat is the preferred way to contact a company’s customer support or post-sales support teams.
Advantages
Live chat offers numerous benefits. The primary ones are as follows:
- Live chat makes it simpler to manage complex conversations. Certain questions require detailed explanations and discussions. By speaking to someone in real time, it’s easier for customers to get difficult matters resolved with utmost transparency and efficiency. Therefore, 79 percent of consumers prefer live chat because they can get an instantaneous response.
- Live chat makes it possible to assist several different people simultaneously, as the agents can manage multiple conversations at the same time, thus boosting your team’s efficiency and performance.
- The ability to categorize chats in order to direct them to the corresponding team of experts enables more rapid and precise assistance for a better customer experience.
Principle software programs
A number of programs can help you implement live chat. Here are a few:
Chatbot
Chatbots answer internet users’ questions by means of a system of keywords and pre-recorded responses. They are robotic systems that aren’t capable of thinking or understanding what an internet user says to them. These robots are basically designed to improve the customer experience by automating sales, commercial relations and customer support, answering standardized and recurring questions that they have been previously trained to address. According to ubisend, 21 percent of consumers consider chatbots the easiest means of contacting a company.
You can install a chatbot on a website or a messaging app like Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, and their use is virtually ubiquitous.
Most chatbot programs also enable redirecting a conversation to a human agent via live chat. It’s an appealing solution, as it allows you to implement an automatic first line of response. A real person can then complete the interaction in more complex cases, thus increasing customer satisfaction rates.
Advantages
Chatbots offer certain advantages over live chat:
- They’re active 24/7
- Their responses are immediate and precise
- The service is consistent and less prone to errors
- They are easily scalable
- They enable collecting basic customer information
- They are a good way to keep your clients engaged when the customer support team is unavailable
- They can help you increase sales through the use of promotional codes and by reducing the instances of abandoned shopping carts, for example
Principle software programs
There are numerous solutions. The main ones are as follows:
- Chatfuel for Messenger, Facebook and Instagram
- ManyChat for Facebook
- Freshdesk for WhatsApp, Messenger, Apple Business Chat and the internet
- SnapEngage for the internet
- ChatBot for the internet
- Drift, which you can combine with live chat
To summarize, even if you believe that you’re lightyears away from integrating live chat or a chatbot into your website, you should bear in mind that, like any other project, this one requires advance planning!
