Defining Your Live Chat Objectives: What Do I Want from My Live Chat?

Just because you may use the same live chat software as another company does not mean that your businesses should use it in the exact same way. Before you design your live chat campaign, it is important that you first examine what your company hopes to achieve with your live chat software, and which live chat benefits you wish to reap. Knowing your live chat objectives will help you create a live chat experience that best fits your business needs.

So how might you go about defining your live chat objectives? In this blog post we will cover several common objectives that you may have for your live chat, along with tips on what sorts of processes you can implement in order to achieve these objectives.

As you are reading, ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I want from live chat: what are my priorities?
• How do I want my customers to experience live chat?
• How can I create a live chat experience that fits my business needs?

Using Live Chat to Maximize Customer Satisfaction

It doesn’t matter what field you are in; every successful business wants to leave a positive impression on their customers. A vital part of this is providing exceptional, easy to access customer support. For some companies, this is the main goal of live chat and their primary live chat benefit.

By adding a live chat presence to their website, companies can improve their performance and satisfaction levels among customers by making sure that their customers are getting the help that they need while online.

The good news is that as long as you have professional and capable live chat agents, maximizing customer satisfaction through live chat should be a breeze. A big live chat benefit is that live chat has a higher customer satisfaction rate than traditional support systems like phone and email.

Using Live Chat to Generate Leads and Increase Sales

While it is great to use live chat to satisfy current customers, this may not be your company’s primary live chat objective. Instead, many businesses use live chat primarily as a lead generation tool in order to bring in more sales. This means that their live chat experiences are focused less on current customers, and more on prospect customers.

By using features such as proactive chat, companies can reach out to current website visitors with promotional offers and other visitor-specific buying incentives to help reel in a purchase. This is especially useful for e-commerce websites, travel websites, and other businesses that are looking to sell a product, fast.

Live chat can also help companies generate leads with the following features:

• Live chat visitor data lets companies monitor visitor behavior to deliver a more personalized service, which can result in more sales.
• With the agent wrap-up option, agents can tag visitors as a lead for future follow-up.
• Live chat integration with Salesforce automatically adds visitors who are tagged as leads to a list of email marketing campaign recipients, increasing their exposure to your promotional material.

Using Live Chat to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

If your company suffers from a high shopping cart abandonment rate, then this live chat objective may be for you. There are many ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment, and one of those ways is by having a visible, proactive live chat presence.

Some website visitors add items to their shopping cart, but when it comes time to check out, they may not be totally convinced that it’s worth the purchase. When you proactively engage with a visitor who is somewhere in the mid stages of the buying process, you reduce the likelihood that they will abandon their purchase due to an unanswered question or a lingering doubt. By setting your rule-based proactive chat invitation to get sent out to customers who have a certain merchandise value in their shopping carts, you can automate this process.

Sometimes visitors abandon shopping carts for cost-related reasons. Your website’s shipping fee might be higher than they were expecting, or they might want to wait to see if they can find the same product for cheaper elsewhere. In order to avoid these scenarios, your company can send out proactive live chat messages with discounts and time-specific deals, such as the following:

Using Live Chat to Provide Support to a Global Audience

For international customers, calling a support line can be extremely costly, and even difficult to do. This is why many companies who do business with customers from several countries share the live chat objective of using chat as a means of providing support for a global audience.

If your company has or wants a world-wide reach, it is wise to create multiple versions of your company website in different languages, so that customers can access the proper webpage and the proper live chat link depending on what country they are browsing from. This can help visitors and customers avoid any difficulty when seeking help, and will maximize your gain from this live chat benefit.

If you do not offer services internationally, but want to offer national support in more than one language, you can implement multiple live chat buttons on one page, and assign each its own routing rule. For example, this means that you can offer a live chat button in Spanish that routes Spanish-speaking customers to Spanish-speaking representatives, while selecting your regular live chat option routes customers to English-speaking representatives.

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Using Live Chat to Reduce Operating Costs

Some companies’ main reason for using live chat is to reduce operating costs. This is possible because by switching from a toll-free support line to live chat support, your company can actually save a lot of money.

There are several ways that implementing live chat can help you save. The more minutes a customer who called a toll-free number spends on the phone, the higher your company’s phone bill. Live chat also allows agents to handle multiple chats at once, something that is impossible to do with two phone calls. This means that an agent might spend 10 minutes responding to two or three customer issues simultaneously over live chat – an act which may have required double that time over the phone, due to the need to engage in separate conversations with each of these customers.

Using Live Chat to Complement Existing Self-Service Strategies

There are businesses that prefer that their customers use existing self-service strategies, such as an FAQ system, before reaching out to a representative. These companies feature live chat as a second resort, in case customers are not able to find the help that they need themselves, rather than as a primary means of support.

This sort of live chat experience can be especially beneficial to companies who have a limited amount of support staff, as well as companies who have invested in an elaborate FAQ system. In these cases, it is important that live chat be designed to enhance the self-serve experience – not to replace it. This means avoiding proactive chat, and giving your live chat button a more subdued presence, to gently nudge the customer towards self-service first.

Using Live Chat as Part of a Successful Multi or Omni-Channel Approach

Maybe some, or several, of the live chat objectives we have covered so far align with your company’s live chat objectives. Or maybe you want to implement live chat because you know that in this internet day-and-age, live chat is an important part of a successful multi-channel or omni-channel approach to customer service.

Customers increasingly want to be able to communicate with companies across multiple channels. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, live chat, and mobile apps are modern channels that have recently captured the interest of audiences, in addition to the traditional channels of phone and email.

Conclusion

Whether you add live chat to your website in order to increase sales, or simply to facilitate communication with customers, defining your live chat objectives will help you implement the optimal chat process that effectively works with your distinct business strategy.

What live chat benefits do you hope to gain from your live chat experience? Let us know in the comments below!

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