Having a chat support channel allows you to converse with your customers and visitors in real-time while they are on your website.
Customers adore it because it is convenient, faster than any other digital service channel, and allows them to multitask while receiving immediate answers to their problems.
Other than these benefits, there are plenty of other reasons you should consider integrating pay-per-minute chat software into your business.
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You Solve Problems Fast
The 2018 SuperOffice Customer Care Benchmark report showed that 62% of businesses do not respond to customer care emails, and the average response time for a customer service request is more than 12 hours.
That is a concerning statistic. When it comes to live chat, however, response and resolution times are nearly immediate.
In fact, Zopim analyzed over 85K chats in their survey and discovered that a chat agent responds to a client query in less than 23 seconds on average, with a resolution time of no more than 42 seconds.
This means that with chat software, you get to address customer problems quickly.
Faster problem resolution time contributes to increased customer satisfaction since customers receive immediate, tailored, and efficient service without having to wait hours or even days for a response.
You Save Money on Staff
By allowing your customer service representatives to handle many chats at the same time, live chat can significantly boost their productivity and efficiency.
As a result, a smaller support team is required because fewer personnel can handle more customer support requests in the same amount of time.
According to Telus International research, customer service personnel can engage in up to six simultaneous chats, depending on the complexity of the issues at hand. As a result, you don’t need to hire too many people as the software makes the work easy.
While customer service representatives can handle many clients, Econsultancy recommends chat agents should handle no more than 2-3 concurrent chat sessions; otherwise, response time may increase while customer satisfaction may decrease.
Increase in sales
By strategically using the pay-per-minute chat software, you can significantly increase your sales.
One way you can increase sales is by recommending appropriate products to your consumers by up-selling and cross-selling to boost the average order value without incurring additional advertising costs.
A classic example is a report done by Internet Retailer that discovered that with live chat, Virgin Airlines upsold customers and converted them 3.5 times more often.
They accomplished this by focusing on specific flights that the airline wished to prioritize for bookings and sending proactive chat invites to customers who were already looking at these routes.
This strategy resulted in a 15% increase in average order value while saving the organization money on answering phone calls and replying to customer emails.
The airline also stated that one average chat agent could complete the task of 15 email-focused workers.
Another study by Forrester found that clients who talk prior to making a purchase had a 10% higher average order value, a 48% higher revenue per conversation hour, and a 40% higher conversion rate. All of which you can achieve with the chat software.
If you are a service provider, you not only get to convert your customers fast but also make more money from the commissions you make from the chats.
Cheaper and Easy Integration
In terms of technical costs, live chat tends to be less expensive than phone help because it is cloud-based and requires only a membership fee.
Telephony infrastructure, on the other hand, typically necessitates a bigger initial investment as well as ongoing maintenance expenditures.
Toll-free numbers, for example, have both a continuous cost to retain the number and per-minute charges for each call.
Chat support also reduces the cost per interaction. Back in 2014, Aspect Software projected that if best practices are followed, the cost per web chat session is roughly $8-$10, whereas the average phone call session cost ranges between $35 and $50 per engagement.
While these figures may vary today, especially with the increasing popularity of AI-powered chatbots, agent-powered live chat remains a cost-effective support channel that you should take advantage of.
It is also considerably faster and easier to implement live chat support. Essentially, all you need to do is copy and paste a line of code into your website’s pages and configure the chat window – all of this can be done in minutes and does not require advanced technical knowledge.
Best practices when implementing pay-per-minute chat software
To get the most from the software, you need to consider a number of tips. These tips include:
Choose the Right Software
When you’re in the market looking for chat support software, don’t buy just any software. This is because no two software programs are the same.
To stay on the safe side, take your time and choose live chat software with the proper collection of features to satisfy your business’s goals while remaining within your budget.
Fortunately, most chat providers offer free trials that allow you to test all of their capabilities. You should first test the software and only commit once you have established that it is right for your business.
Have a Dedicated Team
Have a dedicated customer support team to handle the chat queries. It’s pointless to provide live help if you’re going to keep your consumers waiting for a response instead of providing it right away.
If you are unable to provide 24/7 assistance, disable the chat button or set it to offline when your agents are unavailable to answer chat inquiries.
It will even be better if you can outline your chat hours so that your website visitors know when they can reach you in real-time.
Be strategic
You should have a plan of how you will use the chat feature intelligently. Don’t bother your website visitors by bombarding them with unwanted pop-up conversation invites.
Keep in mind that targeted and individualized chat invitations are always more effective. So, find a way to customize the invitations and always make it easy for the customers to reach you.
