The website that your business has is essentially an extra employee that keeps the storefront open while you go home, hopefully get some time to unwind and get some sleep. The problem is that people who are looking at the products and services offered on your website may have some questions and in today’s competitive marketplace answering them as quickly as possible could be the difference between making and losing a sale. So if you have been considering adding a live chat feature to your website now may be the time.
Live chat
Live chat software is pretty much exactly what its name implies. A visitor to your website is able to message your business and reach someone on staff in a matter of seconds. With that hopefully their questions are answered and you turn that visitor into a customer.
Chances are you have used a feature like this already. Facebook Messenger is essentially the same thing, it’s just this is on your website and not on your Facebook page so the visitor will not need to find your Facebook page, login and send a message through that platform.
Quicker responses mean happier customers
Responses in the past have taken time. Responding to an email can take around 12 hours to respond to and most customers or visitors do not even know if the email was received much less even looked at. A recent study shows that 62% of all businesses don’t even respond to emails from customers. It is not much better on social media with response times around 10 hours. Yes, most customers understand that you do need to get some sleep and sending a message in the middle of the night is usually not going to get a quick response, but that timeframe could be so much better.
Think about it, on Facebook it tells you how responsive a business is to messages and many people are more likely to do business with a more responsive one. A live chat can take care of that. Throw in that live chatting with a customer can be much more informal and can help to have a personality come out which can reveal a lot about you, why not?
Further benefits of a live chat
If you are considering adding a live chat feature to your website there are good reasons to do so. Multiple studies have shown that it has a definite boost for conversions, possibly by up to 20% as a study by the American Marketing Association found. More than one third of all customers say that having the ability to chat with someone was the difference between buying from a business or a competitor. It is also easier to upsell or increase order sizes as well. A live chat could give you a competitive advantage in that regards as it is not a business standard so your competitors may not have it.
Furthermore a live chat can help to cut down on your costs. Why exactly? Your employees or sales force could potentially spend less time on the phone with one client and chatting with 4 or 5 of them. Call centers or over the phone support is not cheap and employees can manage more chats at one time so it cuts down on wait time and gets visitors or customers issues addressed quicker. No one likes to spend time sitting on hold. By decreasing the amount of time a customer has to wait to have a question or problem addressed it also decreases the likelihood of that customer returning an item.
Adding a live chat plugin to your WordPress site is easy. There are numerous ones to choose from and many are free. Live chats can help build trust with a potential buyer or someone who is already a customer and can help your business stand out. With the potential reward of more customers who place larger orders, why not give it a try?