Quintessentially, running a successful business is all about effective communication. Even the best message or offer could be lost in bad communication or lack of thereof.
A 24×7 website live chat service is an essential prerequisite to ensure seamless business communication.
Let me explain!
As a business, you’re always expected to provide seamless and engaging business communication.
But, this is a catch-22 situation.
You may be able to personally handle all customer interactions when you are a small business. But as your business gets bigger, you’ll need to handle a higher volume of interactions. You may struggle to personally manage interactions at this point.
This condition is especially true when you’re managing initial interactions, aka communication with your future customers.
The difference between closing a deal or hitting a brick wall with negotiations could lie in how you manage your initial lead interactions. It could also turn your one-time customers into a long-term loyal clientele.
In this situation, you need an effective 24×7 live chat solution that’ll ensure all your leads get actively vetted and handed over to your sales team.
Customer Service is now 24X7X365 (Period)
There is no need for customer research or audience polling….
The one thing that present day customer lacks for sure is “patience.” Most customers aren’t ready to wait for 24 hours to get response to their questions. As per Google, the term 24×7 and customer service have grown in search volume by 400%.
This data is almost two years old now. Based on general
trends, this search would have likely doubled by 2020.
Now, let’s imagine what this means?
This means that
customers are looking to troubleshoot their issues during off-hours. Needless
to say, they’re also likely to spend more time during public holidays trying to
do the same.
If your customer service isn’t available during this time,
it could directly lead to customer agitation.
At the same time, it may not be best to ask for your employees to turn-up during off-hours or holidays.
A 24×7 live chat provides a balanced middle ground to manage both customer and employee requirements. This means that all
Does your business actually need 24×7 live chat?
Don’t really need 24×7 Live chat
Albeit, not all businesses need a 24×7 availability. In some cases, a 24×7 live chat will be giving-out the wrong message.
For example, let’s look at the case of a food vendor. Having a live chat option may give the visitor an impression that you can avail takeouts at 3.00 AM.
For this, you need to analyze your website traffic based on lead conversions.
First of all, let’s review when’s the peak time that you usually get your website visitors and leads?
If you haven’t done it, let me help you.
Actually, it’s quite simple.
You can simply log-into your website’s Google analytics and check the time when your pages has new visitors. Alternatively, we have also added a custom template of Report that’ll tell you exactly when your website gets maximum hits.
Identify the peak Period. Period.
You may be surprised to see that your website gets maximum hits during your business off-hours. For example, a busy professional may decide to get online and check on their project at 11.00 Clock at night.
But your sales team might be only available during 9 AM – 7 –PM. Literally, this means that you might be keeping your customers on-hold for better part of the day.
In short, your visitor should be able to easily understand whether they can avail your business services right now.
In this situation, you can say that a 24×7 live chat software will be indispensable to meet your business goals. Now, let’s see why your business would benefit from a 24×7 live chat availability.
1. Proactively initiate successful interactions
As per Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report, 58% of clients considers stellar customer service and communications to be essentially a deal maker or breaker during the consideration of a brand.
The below graph gives a representation of how important could a ‘live chat option’ play at swaying the customer loyalty buying preferences for a product or brand.
In other words, it’s simply a prerequisite to drive customer action in the current social media era.
Unfortunately, quality business communication gets relegated to backseat in all types and sizes of businesses. Usually, the business owners are guilty of this sharp dip in the quality of customer interactions.
Let me explain.
If it’s a small or medium scale business, the owner needs to juggle between different processes and operations on a daily basis. This could lead to a loss of quality in your customer and lead interactions. Finally, this could even lead to a critical loss of your brand equity.
In this situation, the quality and speed of your customer response will come under serious scrutiny.
What could be the right solution here?
The right light-weight communication tool fills this gap and guides you towards becoming more successful in your daily operations.
2. Make your business communications intelligent
WIth the right 24×7 customer interactions system, you can intelligently manage your business interactions offers a solution under this scenario.
Even if your live chat isn’t up and available, 24×7 Live chat software provides an optimal initial touchpoint to register the queries.
Now, let’s look into the different 24×7 live chat options available at your disposal. There are mainly two options that include
- Outsource live chat to your qualified chat service provider.
- Implement a chatbot that responds to preset customer queries
- Generate better form of customer response management.
In this situation, the Live chat solution could optimally manage your business service.
Now that we have come to an understanding of Live chat solution. should be positioned as the chief communication device in your business.
3. Understand and respond to your customers in a seamless Way
As it is, most businesses have struggled at some-point at keeping-up and responding to all the inbound inquiries. This is especially true for growing businesses, because they might not be equipped to handle those enquiries.
You may see CRM solutions that advertise themselves as the once-and-fix-all solution for the problem.
They may be an easily manageable place to manage all inbound queries and leads.
But they don’t address the actual problem – you simply have too many enquiries to be managed internally on a daily basis.
In turn, this requires you to have a communication system that’ll better manage your business interactions. A 24×7 live chat software can be a comprehensive way of managing all inbound interactions within a business.
4. Prioritize your customer support channels
A live chat system can handle all your customer queries that hit your website or facebook page. If you have outsourced live chat support, you can segment and filter those queries for effective resolution.
In turn, this will increase your overall customer satisfaction.
This also alleviates the requirement for having an employee to be always on the que to respond to your employees. Through this capability, you don’t have to worry about losing customers as a result of being unable to respond promptly or giving the wrong answers to their questions.
Instead of having a policy of prompt reply, you can provide an accurate response, which is most likely to carry forward the interactions towards a positive way.
The right live chat auto-responder will also provide a focussed way to engage and grow your business-customer relationships.
5. Qualify and manage leads through a sales funnel
All too often, you might find yourself closely following-up with a lead that doesn’t lead to a closure or sale. Have a dozen of leads such as these and they might take-up your entire day.
Instead, you need to stop wasting your time and effort on unqualified leads. Instead, we should be able to dedicate more resources and time on better ways to manage available opportunities.
A 24×7 live chat system can collect enquiries and sort your potential leads according to your criteria to find the best possible leads.
Along with increased lead conversions, you can also avail better way of communicating with your visitors. This allows you to create a live chat communication tool that’ll better serve your customers for higher customer satisfaction.
6. Convert acquired leads into sales opportunities
Even if you’re consistently acquiring leads, they could be quite useless until they’re converted into closed deals. A 24×7 live chat software can help you derive an effective system that helps you convert leads into sales opportunities.
A live chat system will help you combine serve your leads as well as manage your opportunities. This helps you individually validate and qualify each lead coming into your sales funnel.
With the ability to respond to all questions, you will be also able to make your communication stand out from the rest of business. This will particularly improve the customer experience and brand loyalty for your business.
7. Manage overall interactions in a cost-effective way
An enthusiastic sales manager is often tempted to believe that he can manage all interactions that come his way. This could be true during the initial stages.
But when business grows and gains traction, your ability to drive personalized interactions will get incrementally limited on a daily basis. In this case, you can foresee a significant slip at the amount of business interactions that gets allocated to your sales team.
In this scenario, you might need to improve your capability to manage customer interactions. There are two options to achieve this objective.
- Scale your team to manage increased interactions.
- Try to limit the inbound queries, this will cause a drop in the number of customer interactions.
- Outsource a part of your activities.
If you compare all these methods, you’ll know that both the first and second methods will cost your revenue.
Having to scale your team comes with upfront cost and limiting inbound queries will throttle your inbound opportunities.
On the other hand, if you can productively outsource your live chat it will be a much easier way to manage your customer interactions. Also, it’ll be a much happier alternative for both your teams and customers.
Today, the leads harder to acquire and tougher to convert into paid customers. It also takes more to satisfy your existing customers. In this case, a live chat software will help you make the best of both worlds.
8. Create an omni-channel customer Service approach
In most businesses, customer service tends to get disconnected and may need to pass through different silos to acquire an accurate response. Often, this leads to less effective ways of managing customer interactions. In turn, this leads to a lower level NPS.
With CRM software, you may be able to eliminate unnecessary silos within our operating system. But this still won’t lead you to an effective way of managing your business interaction.
For that, you need to nail one-to-one communication with your customers.
If you have live chat software, it’ll help you with collecting all queries and interactions within a single chat box. Later, you can segregate and collect queries for effective processing. In this way, you can systematically optimize how your queries gets attended and processes within a chatbox.
An API integration will let you add your company’s social media accounts, websites, and even phone calls from your contact lines. Usually, handling all such accounts will require you to hire more employees for each branch of communication.
However, it is through communication software that you can avoid the cost associated with hiring while also gaining the ability to grow your business through the use of multiple accounts without having to worry about workload and errors.
9. Build and reinforce Brand loyalty through live chat
Let’s look into some verified live chat software statistics.
As per data, the companies that implemented live chat solution saw an overwhelming increase in customer loyalty, sales, and revenue.
This means that live chat isn’t just a complementary value add-on for most businesses. It’s the easiest and most accessible way to communicate with your visitors and customers who’re currently visiting your website..
In this sense, the live chat has substituted the traditional phone calls as the chief means of customer interactions.
In turn, this will lead to generate a higher level of customer satisfaction.
Conclusion:-
In order to grow a business, you need to consistently add new customers. To add new customers, you need to have access to quality new leads on a daily basis. And, there lies the problem.
Today, there are multiple lead management or CRM systems that promises to convert your leads in a whiff. But these can only create a systematic process to convert your acquired leads.
In order to acquire and convert leads, you need to engage individual visitors.This requires you to sift through the bulk of leads and focus on the right opportunities. This could be achieved only through adding a 24×7 Live chat services in your website.
By understanding each new user request or custom requirement, you can proactively responded on a second-to-second basis. In turn, this’ll position you to deliver tailored customer responses, which meets their specific requirements. In all these cases,you’ll be able to achieve incrementally higher customer satisfaction within your business.
In all these cases,you’ll be able to achieve incrementally higher customer satisfaction within your business.
Mr. Prassanna Kumar is Industry veteran with in-depth experience in managing 24×7 chat agents and different marketing activities. He has experience at growing brands in different industry verticals. You can connect with him at his linkedin profile