Your small business is leaving money on the table — here’s how to fix it with multi-channel live chat
When small businesses invest in experiences that connect with customer needs, the return can be huge. Imagine discovering a proven tactic to increase sales, build customer loyalty, and drive profit gains. It’s possible, and it’s due to the growth of conversational commerce.
Live chat via multiple inbound channels like your website and social media channels make it easy for your customers to reach you at every point on their path to purchase. If your small business isn’t offering the live chat capability needed to reap these rewards, you might be leaving money on the table.
Here, we’ll dig into why multi-channel live chat is so important for small businesses.
Your customers want chat commerce options
Customers are increasingly expecting chat commerce options. In a post highlighting the growth of live chat on the International Customer Management Institute’s (ICMI) blog, Brad Cleveland writes:
“For businesses looking for ways to engage customers, chat should be strongly considered as an important and integrated access channel. And once you have it, continue to strengthen your management of it (forecasting, staffing, quality, et al.) — it’s not going away anytime soon.”
It’s easy to see why. Live chat and commerce capabilities via chat channels has been shown to significantly enhance the customer experience. A J.D. Power study found that live chat earned the highest customer satisfaction scores, followed by email and phone.
The eDigitalResearch report backs this up — live chat has the highest customer satisfaction rating, standing at 73 percent. This is compared with email at 61 percent, phone at 44 percent, and social media at 48 percent.
Don’t miss the opportunity to give your customers what they want.
Scale one-on-one engagement
You may not have a large team or a big budget. But that doesn’t mean you want to skimp on customer service. In fact, you know good customer support can be a competitive differentiator for your business.
Providing multi-channel live chat options lets you scale personalized customer service.
Research from TELUS International shows chat capabilities let companies engage with multiple customers at the same time, reducing costs.
Now, when you include a solution like Clickatell Touch, you can respond to multiple queries at the same time. So, you’re freeing up customer support to engage with the deeper questions — the trickier cases — while still delivering personalized customer engagement.
Increases sales
When your customers are happy, it’s not a stretch to imagine they’re more likely to spend their hard-earned cash at your business. Digital marketing expert Neil Patel estimates live chat can boost conversions by 45 percent. Research curated by FurstPerson points to a major link between live chat and sales — 77 percent of customers won’t buy on a website if there’s no live chat.
The mere presence of live chat on a site could improve the customer’s likelihood of buying by almost 60 percent, according to a Bold Chat research report.
Not only will you boost the number of sales, but you also stand to bump up the value of each transaction. Forrester found a 19 percent rise in average order value from customers who engage in live chat compared with customers who didn’t use live chat.
Deliver the speed your customers want
Providing fast responses is critical to delivering superior customer service. Speed is one of the primary drivers of live chat’s rising popularity, according to research by Econsultancy.
Inc. contributor Nicholas Cole writes that 42 percent of consumers prefer live chat over other channels because they don’t have to wait for a response. And other platforms simply can’t compete.
According a SuperOffice report, it can take up to 12 hours for a company to answer client queries.
With multi-channel live chat, you can answer questions immediately. This matters because customers are unforgiving when it comes to delayed responses. They will stop using a product or service if they have to suffer through slow response times, according to Forrester.
This creates a horrible customer experience, damages your brand and hits your bottom line.
Live chat software like Clickatell Touch which enables you to unify your response teams across your social media channels and website, gives your small business the power to respond to several queries all from the same place, and a whole lot quicker than inbound channels like email and phone calls. This is how you craft satisfying customer experiences — no hold times or delayed responses.
Live chat cuts infrastructure costs
Entrepreneurs know it’s critical to manage expenses and reduce costs, even as you scale, and live chat helps you curb costs in a few important ways.
A study by Oracle shows expenses climb quickly if a customer needs to contact a company multiple times to resolve a query. Of course, there’s also the brand damage that comes with failing to resolve customer queries.
According to statistics curated by HelpScout, more than half of US consumers have scrapped a planned transaction due to poor service, and a third will consider switching companies after just one negative experience.
Simply put: your small business can’t afford to compromise on delivering good service.
It’s why chat commerce and live chat options are the most cost-effective ways to deliver a positive customer experience.
Now, web chat is up to 30 percent cheaper than a phone call, estimates Call Center Helper. There are also none of the ongoing maintenance costs that come with running phone lines, reports TELUS International.
While voice calls need complicated on-premises infrastructure, cloud-based solutions like Clickatell Touch only require affordable subscription fees. There’s no large upfront investment and none of the ownership risks that can accompany traditional phone systems, advises the TELUS International report.
The result? You have more capital to invest in growing your business.
Supercharge your small business with multi-channel live chat
Enabling your customers to contact you via the channels they prefer is a surefire way to connect with them and drive business growth. Customers can reach your company on their own terms, dramatically improving the customer experience. Get started for free today with Clickatell Touch, and make it easy for your customers to find you across every step of their purchasing journey.
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