No one wants to be placed on hold when calling into a customer support center. And nobody wants to send a support email only to wait for 48 hours to get a response.
If you don’t solve your customers’ problems sooner, they might move on to a competitor with faster response rates.
And that could cost you.
A customer support software with live chat capability can help. It offers help to real people in real time. People prefer it over other support options, too.
74% of consumers prefer chatbots when they’re searching for instant answers to their support problems, while 92% of customers find that they are satisfied after using the live chat feature.
Here’s how live chat is improving the world of online support, and why you should pay more attention to it.
For starters, everyone is using live chat to communicate with their customers. If your business isn’t, you’re the odd one out.
Everyone is Using Live Chat to Communicate With Customers
Contents
Live chat is a method that can help your agents and your customers solve problems more quickly. It’s informative, easy, and customers get to chat with a live person every single time.
For example, live chat and AI help Lyft quickly manage the rides and customer service needs of ten million riders per week.
Director and Voice of Customer at Lyft, Jaime Gilliam-Swartz, says: “We’ve seen an uptick in the adoption of our interactive help, and we work hard to make sure that the majority of people leave with a resolution in less than 30 seconds.”
Jamie also says that Lyft customers don’t want to wait for an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) where they have to press a button for help and be placed on hold if they don’t have to.
They would rather avoid having to physically speak to someone. The interactive AI chat feature on Lyft’s app helps them do that. All they have to do to get started is press “Help.”
And the company isn’t alone. 42% of all support contact is carried out through live chat, with email following at 23% and social media at 16%.
This large margin shows just how favored live chat is over other forms of contact.
The best part? You can get more website conversions than ever before with live chat.
Get More Website Conversions With Live Chat
Since live chat is real-time and on-site, questions are resolved right then and there, before customers become frustrated and decide not to buy. That means higher website conversions.
Since it’s so quick and convenient, customers love it.
According to data from Convince & Convert, 42% of customers complaining on social media want a 60 minute response time. Live chat performs 30x better than that.
In fact, live chat response times are only 3.9 minutes, on average, while social media and email response times usually take longer than 24 hours.
Live chat keeps customers of companies like UserLike satisfied and coming back for more.
79% of businesses say that offering live chat has boosted sales, revenue, and customer loyalty.
38% of customers are more likely to purchase from companies that offer live chat support.
It’s also one of the least expensive forms of customer support out there.
Live Chat is Less Expensive
Live chat software can reduce overall contact center costs by decreasing the cost of each interaction.
And since live chat representatives can talk to several customers at once by handling more than one chat at the same time, you need fewer representatives.
For example, it’s less expensive to pay for live chat than it is to keep an entire call center open. In fact, it’s 50% cheaper than the cost of call center support.
According to Telus International research, service agents can engage in up to six chats at a time, depending on how complex each issue is.
On average, it’s more likely that your live chat agents will be able to handle about three chats at the same time.
This is called chat concurrency. With it, agents can solve the same amount of service issues as large teams of phone support agents.
Live chat is also useful for discovering customer pain points.
Uncover Customer Pain Points with Live Chat
One of the greatest live chat benefits is that you can use it to uncover the common pain points your customers have.
A pain point is a problem or need that a customer has that has yet to be solved or addressed.
With traditional support channels like phone or email, it can be tough to uncover the pain points your customers are experiencing because they might only be heard by one team or agent.
But with live chat, agents can usually gain access to previous chat histories, which can be sorted or filtered to find common and recurring pain points that customers are experiencing.
That way, you can easily uncover what should improve your products or services by looking at pain point trends.
Conclusion
Online support, like live chat, is the kind of support that your customers want to see.
Everyone is using it for a reason. You can use it to solve support issues faster than ever before, all in real time.
Because of this, live chat can boost your overall website conversions, which means more happy customers and more revenue.
On top of that, it’s less expensive than other forms of support. A small team of a few live chat agents can help as many customers as a large team of call center agents.
You can even use live chat to uncover customer pain points, which can help you improve the services and products you offer.
If you aren’t using live chat, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity for customer retention.
Get started with live chat now before you lose customers to the competitors who are already offering it.