Live chats are a relatively modern development in the online customer service world. However, what many do not realize is that these little boxes, used to either automatically or manually converse with potential customers and clients, are fantastic for closing off and increasing sales.
The best companies are versatile and use the software at their disposal to its greatest potential. While sales might not always be a live chat’s primary function, knowing how to use it for that purpose is an incredibly useful nugget of information to wield.
- Round the clock operations
Embracing live chat software is a huge step in helping your business operate effectively around the clock. The more time that your business can spend speaking to customers, answering questions at their convenience, and directing customers towards your sales and contact pages, the more leads you are going to create.
While best practices dictates that frequently asked questions should have their own page on your website anyway, live chats allow you to resolve smaller and less-common issues even outside of business hours.
- Accuracy and problem solving
This kind of problem-solving can encourage increased sales. Customers are more likely to make a purchase after they have answers to the questions they are mulling over before they make an investment. If your company helps provide those answers, then it becomes more likely to win a specific customer’s business.
Problem-solving also encourages accurate customer expectations. Customers want an accurate and full view of your product or service before buying. Nothing on your website should be misleading, but if a customer does happen to be unsure about an item you have on offer, then the ability to clear questions up over live chat is a valuable one.
- Aiding navigation
Presuming your website has specific pages intended to close sales and progress leads – such as sales pages or contact information – you are probably keen to see those pages receive more traffic. Programming an automatic live chat to try and navigate customers towards those pages could pay dividends. Even a manually run live chat, either by your own staff or through outsourcing, can be run in a way that helps direct potential customers to where you want them.
- Message and conversation length
Once you have decided to use your live chat to try and improve sales, you need to know how to do it. In general, keep messages shorter than a few sentences, as too much information could confuse customers and overload them with information. Try and determine what it is the customer wants as quickly as possible so that you can direct them to the necessary page, progress the lead and move on to the next customer. Always ask if there is anything more the customer needs help with before ending the conversation.
- Migrate to email
Finally, remember you can use a live chat to ask for a customer’s email address if that is the way that your company prefers to close sales or provide customer support. Some customers, for example those pressed for time or who prefer traditional communication methods, will prefer this to live chat.