Defining Live Chat Objectives

Just because you may use the same live chat software as another company doesn’t 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 of the live chat benefits that we covered will be most valuable to your company.

So how might you go about defining your live chat objectives? In this section of our eBook, 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 read the following, ask yourself these three 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.

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. Remember that this is because customers gain more satisfaction through live chat than traditional customer support channels.

Make It a Reality: If your company’s live chat objective is to use chat as a means of maximizing customer satisfaction, make sure to take part in the following practices:

• Train your live chat representatives thoroughly on topics such as how to positively say no to customers, when and how to use canned messages, how to effectively end a chat session, and so on.
• Be sure to emphasize first-contact resolution above all else to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
• Make sure that your live chat presence is easily visible and accessible to customers. This means positioning your live chat button or window where customers will be able to find it should they wish to seek out live chat assistance.

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 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.

Make It a Reality: If you are ready to implement live chat as a means of generating leads and increasing sales, be sure to do the following:

• Set up automated proactive chat invitations to engage with visitors automatically based on pre-defined rules. This will save your live chat representatives from having to manually message specific visitors, and will result in more profit for your business.
• Use the Visitor Segmentation Feature to reach out to different groups of customers who are most likely to convert into sales.

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. You can automate this process by sending out rule-based proactive chat invitations to customers who have a certain merchandise value in their shopping carts.

Sometimes visitors abandon their 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. To avoid these scenarios, your company can send out proactive live chat messages with discounts and time-specific deals, such as the following:

Make It a Reality: If you are using live chat to reduce your current shopping cart abandonment rates, be sure to reap this live chat benefit by taking care of the following:

• Use practices such as proactive chat implementation based on timing rules (such as the visitor has spent more than 15 minutes on the website), or based on the value of the merchandise that visitors have in their shopping carts (for example, set rules to proactively chat with customers with $100 and up in merchandise).
• Apply proactive chat scripts to encourage a sense of hurry. This can help keep visitors from navigating away from your website prematurely and eventually forgetting about or losing interest in your product.

Using Live Chat to Provide Support to a Global Audience

In the last section, we mentioned how 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 an international customer base share the 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.

Make It a Reality: If your live chat objective is to satisfy an international customer-base, you can take advantage of the following live chat features:

• Use the Multiple Campaigns feature to provide live chat support in different languages across different websites.
• Use the Dynamic Campaign option to implement different live chat language options and routing rules (on one webpage)

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. As we mentioned in the previous section, 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.

Make It a Reality: The primary objective of using live chat to save you money is easy to use in conjunction with other live chat objectives. You achieve this the following ways:

• Clearly advertise your live chat presence on your website and make sure that it is easy to find your live chat option on popular search engines alongside your toll-free phone number. This will allow more customers to opt to engage with your company over live chat.
• Hire part-time and remote live chat workers to save money for your company.

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-service experience – not replace it. This means avoiding proactive chat, and giving your live chat button a more subdued presence that will gently nudge the customer towards self-service first.

Make It a Reality: If your company’s live chat objective is to use chat in conjunction with a self-help system, you may want to do the following:

• Situate your live chat button on only one webpage, such as your “Contact Us” page, rather than making your live chat universally available. This will make it harder for your customers to access your live chat feature.
• Give your live chat button a more subdued presence, so that customers consult the FAQ page or other resources first. This means having a smaller icon, or a hyperlink instead of a live chat button.
• Have your live chat button disappear when your representatives are not online. This will incentivize visitors to look for their answers elsewhere, when possible, and will encourage self-sufficiency.

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

Maybe some, or several, of the live chat objectives that we have gone over align with your company’s live chat objectives. Or maybe you simply 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.

Make It a Reality: To successfully achieve the objective of using live chat as part of a successful multi or omni-channel approach, we encourage you to take the following steps:

• Allow visitors to sign into live chat using their Facebook or Gmail information. This helps you collect visitor information from multiple platforms, and also advertises your presence on these platforms.
• Make sure that your live chat is mobile friendly, and that it is well-integrated with your mobile application. With Comm100, you can enable automatic optimization of your live chat for mobile platforms.
• Integrate your live chat with third-party applications to make your chat more interactive. For example, you can integrate screen sharing through a third-party application, which facilitates conveying information to your customers.