What is Live Chat, and 3 Reasons Your Website Needs It

Sharing is caring!

Live Chat; You have probably heard the term somewhere on the interwebs, or by one of your employees or even tech-savvy friends. Live Chat has been around for a while, but it is making a come back especially with the introduction of Chat Bots, so in this blog post, I want to talk about What is Live Chat? Why and How it will help your business.

By the end of this post, you will have a good idea on the benefits of adding Live Chat functionality to your website, while also giving you a few ideas on how to go about implementing them.

What is live chat

Think of it as a texting portal built on your website. Live chat is usually a third-party plugin integrated into your existing website, offering your potential and existing customers a new and open channel of communication.

You have probably come across it on our website, or other websites on the internet, it is a little round double at the corner of the screen with a prompt to start a conversation with a team member or a sales assistant.

It allows customers to chat with one of your staff members, right on your website without the need to leave it.

Why You Should Add it To Your Website

While there are a lot of web trends and features focused around user experience, one of the main pain points for customers that are hardly addressed is communication. Yes, your customer wants to learn about your products and services, and of course, they want to learn about why they should trust you and give you their money, but no matter what we do, we always miss some information, and there is always a question on your customers’ mind that needs answering.

Aside from having your contact details displayed in a prominent location on your web page, the chat feature will allow customers to engage in conversation with your brand or business from any page, with the least amount of fraction.

Offering a chat feature on your website will help you present your business as a responsive one, and will also help you generate more sales by simply answering any questions and eradicate any hurdles that might be stopping your prospect from making the leap, below are some metrics to take the point home.

Helps Your Business Grow Online

Now that you are all up to date with what live chat is and why you should implement it, purely from a user experience point of view, here are some statistics on what makes it a must-have for every product or service based website;

• 73% of customers, find live chat to be the most satisfying method of communicating with a business.
• 30% of customers expect live customer support on your website.
• It is expected to grow by as much as 80% within the next 12-18 months.
• 77% of customers, won’t make a purchase if the live chat feature wasn’t available on the website.
• 1 in 5 customers is willing to stop using a product as a result of slow response times.

The numbers above might be disturbing and will get you thinking on what potential business loss you had experiences just because your online presence was lacking such a vital feature, companies that have implemented the live chat feature, have found great success; Movember Foundation obtained a 97% customer satisfaction rating, while Intuit increase their sales by 211% 

Conclusion

You are now fully aware of the potential that Live Chat can offer your business, whatever your offering is, whether it is a product or service based. A live chat can help you increase your overall online conversion.

There are a wide range of online SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platforms that will allow you to integrate the feature without developing a custom solution, and only requires basic implementation, so if you are a tech-savvy business owner you can probably integrate it yourself, alternatively you can reach out to your trusted developer to handle it for you.

Little Plug; We can assist you with the implementation of your new Live Chat feature, feel free to get in touch with us, and we will help you figure out what is the best solution for your business and explore any advanced features that might help your business in increasing your online sales conversion.

Sharing is caring!