Why you need to fit live chat into your 2019 sales strategy

For the past few years messaging has been on a meteoric rise, and there’s nothing telling us this trend is likely to stop. In fact, according to the latest reports, messaging is about the most frequent digital activity a person does.

By now, every business should be well on board with conversational commerce — if not, they’re missing out on massive opportunities; not only to support customers, but to engage with potential customers on this highly popular channel, qualify leads, close more sales, build relationships and increase retention.

At the same time that chatbot technology keeps evolving, more and more websites are implementing live chat and allowing instant messaging to become a core part of their business areas for the benefit of marketing, sales and support.

No longer is live chat seen only as a channel for technical support or customer service. Advances in live chat technology have really taken off and made of this tool a valuable resource for your marketing and sales funnel.

Here’s a few reasons why you should be using live chat on your website, if you aren’t already!

Lead generation

One of the greatest benefits of live chat is that it enables you to engage with visitors on your website to qualify leads instantly.

Instant messaging lets businesses connect with customers to find out in seconds what they are after and assist them. Providing you are able to respond to queries quickly, the process of qualifying leads with live chat is incredibly much quicker than with boring webforms or follow-up emails.

Closing more sales

A report by Facebook IQ shows that as much as 53% of buyers are more likely to buy from a business they can message. With statistics like this, would you be willing to take the risk of losing so many potential customers?

In addition, many live chat tools provide powerful analytics that allow you to follow your visitors’ activity in real-time for better understanding, and proactively start conversations based on their behaviour. This is a fantastic opportunity for engaging with prospects with context-based data and closing more sales.

Better customer experience

Engaging in conversation with customers gives you the opportunity to get closer to your customers and deliver a truly personalised service. And, just in case you’ve not heard, personalisation is a key part of customer experience.

Business is built on relationships, and live chat is the ideal channel to start building those relationships. After all, as Adweek reports, messaging is currently the primary platform for sharing information, thoughts and feelings.

When it comes to customer service, it has been reported that customers no longer want to call for support, and web chat applications are now the preference.

Live chat is especially preferred by Millennials, but as more businesses are implementing live chat, the use of chat tools is quickly spreading to consumers of other age groups. In fact, according to findings from a survey by Aspect, as much as 69% of consumers interact with a virtual assistant or chatbot at least once a month.

The ultimate solution to FAQ

The most complete live chat solutions in the market nowadays come with handy help desk functionalities, often enriched with articles. These features allow teams to make the most of self-help resources for customers and address queries with support documentation in a fully automated way.

The truth is customers who demand quick responses no longer want to go through pages with a list of 30 frequently asked questions and answers to find out what they need. More than a trend, the truly better alternative for consumers is to chat with someone who can quickly provide help, interact with a bot assistant to address queries in a second, or use a smart search system to find out what they need — instantly.

Powerful insights for better performance

Another feature that comes with the best live chat tools out there is the powerful reporting functionality.

By installing a chat widget on your website, you’re not only powering conversations that lead to sales, but allowing your company to get insights about how many visitors are interacting with your chat tool, how quick your team is responding, how much conversion is resulting from the interactions, etc. Before you know it, you’ll got enough performance reporting to revolutionise your processes and improve efficiencies at all levels.

In short: Messaging means business.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +415,678 people.

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