Live Chat Isn't Just About Direct Selling

We’ve proven to our client’s time-and-time again that live chat is a great way to increase sales or generate leads. As business owners, we sometimes have to step back and notice the hidden benefits that live chat brings, that indirectly help grow our businesses.

Calming Irate Customers

All businesses have them. They come out of nowhere, and we dread them.

They are known as…irate and very angry customers.

You can have the best customer service ever known to man, yet some people are annoyed and they want answers. They want answers right now! Not tomorrow, not in a few minutes, NOW!

The worse way of dealing with these customers is via email. That 6 hour response time isn’t helping. A quick phone call would be…interesting. Who likes the clear voice of being shouted at and told everything they do is wrong?

Live chat on the other hand can easily take the sting out of these customers. They get the quick, snappy answers they want. Live chat limits the tonality of the conversation and best of all it saves a conversation dragging out for longer than needed.

People will happily be angry for 20 minutes over the phone but on live chat that requires typing. They are much more happy to just get answers and move on.

With our managed live chat services we’ve encountered a fair share of irate customers coming from nowhere. It’s amazing how quickly and easily they can be turned into a happy customer and at the end of the chat, even leave a positive rating.

That’s a happy customer for life.

Weeding out the non-buyers

As mentioned before, online businesses always focus on selling, selling, selling… but have you ever thought about weeding out the non-buyers?

Any sales team member will tell you that the bane of their job is spending 10 minutes on the phone only to find out that the person they are chatting to is not a suitable candidate or that you don’t offer what they need.

Your sales team should only be spending their important time on selling to people who are qualified to buy your products/services.

Live chat is a quick and easy way to ask a few questions to help decide if the person is a suitable buyer or a no-go prospect.

Best of all, these questions can actually be used to help the sales-team. You now know that prospect’s needs, desires and budget before a sales-conversation is even initiated.

This will enable you to direct the sales-call around their specific needs and issues.

Over the course of last season, 75% of our chats with Wasteland Ski’s site visitors were generated into a lead (that’s about 1020 leads that we sent over). But we didn’t just generate the leads, we also qualified each one; leads were qualified so that Wasteland Ski knew who was ready to buy a ski trip and who was simply browsing for the future. Read more about our work with Wasteland Ski here.

It’s something different and they love it

In our managed live chat programme, we handle thousands of chats a month.

Our team answer 100’s of different questions/queries but there is one question that will without doubt always pop up…

“Are you a robot?!”

People tend be shocked (in a good way) that a company would ever offer a live chat service, where they can typically get their query answered straight away.

It’s unfortunate that people have come to expect 1-2 business days for an email response on a question they have had, even if it’s something small such as “Do you offer free shipping?”

They simply don’t believe someone is sitting at their desk ready and waiting to help them.

These are customers/prospects that now have extra trust and reassurance in your business because they have direct access to help. They have something we would all like when buying online… a helping hand.

We’ve had people leave a chat and give feedback stating how amazed they were that our client offered this sort of service.

This is a customer for life.

Our feedback is full of positive comments from our clients’ customers. Check out some of the feedback from Wasteland Ski’s customers in this word cloud.