What Most Brands Overlook In Chat
The simple rule that can help you drive more value in every single conversation with your customers.
Everyone’s jumping on the chat bandwagon. From tiny upstarts to multi-billion-dollar enterprises, every business has an attention-grabbing ‘Talk to Us’ badge splashed across some part of their website.
And for all its merits, business chat still faces a common challenge: most businesses have it, but few know how to utilize it!
Chat has made it significantly easier for customers to connect and communicate with businesses, to the point that most people now expect a chat-driven support or contact experience.
But a chat window isn’t just about easy communication. Its potential goes way beyond that.
It’s an opportunity to create an experience that sticks with whoever’s interacting with your business, long after they end the conversation and go back to their lives.
So that the next time they’re thinking about booking a flight or shopping for a new outfit, they’ll come to you first.
People remember conversations, and chat is a rare chance for brands to make themselves memorable.
The great part about being a chat-friendly business is that the same rules that make a person fun to talk to, also hold good for your brand.
Be funny. Be friendly. Greet people. Take an interest.
Sound human.
Anyone who questions business chat’s ROI may not have understood the point of chat: to turn your intangible business presence into a tangible human one.
Because your customers are humans too, whether you’re a B2C or B2B company. And like all humans, they love a pleasant conversation.
It doesn’t take complex features, in-chat games, or great visuals to engage a customer — it simply requires you to sound like a real person who gives a shit.
And as Owen Williams points out in his fantastic article, that applies to your chatbots just as much as it does to your human support executives.
So if you’re someone who has shrugged away from the idea of using chat as a way to reach more customers (and vice versa), or someone who’s struggling with the ‘ROI of chat,’ maybe you simply need to reconsider your approach.
A good place to start is to ask yourself:
Am I just talking to my customers, or am I engaging them?
