What can chat do for an organization?
Today’s tech-savvy, IM generation of consumers requires multi-channel support offerings and increasingly their preferred support channel is live chat. But other than ensuring that customers receive an immediate response to their inquiry what can chat do for an organization?
Organizations can leverage chat in both sales and support to increase customer satisfaction and generate revenue. Chat can enable support teams to deliver service and support where and when customers need it – whether it be in-game, in-application, a Web form, a shopping cart, or as an escalation channel for self-service – as well as providing an opportunity to generate sales leads, increase Web sales conversion rates and increase revenue by proactively inviting prospects or customers to chat with available sales or support representatives.
Chat enables end users to engage in live question and answer sessions directly with support representatives for improved contact resolution or with sales reps to increase the close rates of customers. Chat can empower multitasking representatives to become more productive across multiple support channels and to offer an immediate, seamless transition from a self-service to assisted channel at critical times during the sales or support interaction.
Does your organization have multi-channel support with chat capability? If so, is it used in sales, support or both? What are the advantages that you’ve experienced? Any disadvantages?
Within your industry, do you consider chat a support channel that improves your customers’ experience? As a consumer, do you prefer to have chat as a support option?
We’re looking into Chat as we try to offer channel of choice for all consumers. However, talking to other premium companies we’ve heard that Chat contact volume has been entirely incremental -this would be tough to handle for us. Does anyone have any contradictory experience?
We have implemented Live Chat throughout our Support and Sales departments. It has been very successful. We find that we do see an increase in volume from 11a-2p ET and also the first 2 or 3 weeks after a critical release. (We release quarterly). One thing I can offer is to make sure you are properly staffed for this and that your staff has all the information they need to respond to these Chat sessions. We did not plan for such a successful launch so soon…and therefore we had several customers “on hold” in the chat sessions for several minutes at a time. Make sure (at least at first) that you have a set of agents readily available for Live Chat even if that means that is their sole purpose for a short time. Otherwise your customers will get frustrated with this new way to get in touch with your company.
Our Live Chat channel currently makes up approximately 25% of our overall daily Customer Support volume (phone/chat/email). We continuously look for ways to grow Live Chat but also share the concern that we don’t want to create incremental volume. Ideally, we’d like to see the increase in Live Chat volume come from the phone channel!
One other advantage of Live Chat is that it gives us a more low-cost means for potential weekend support. Several times we have tested the use of Live Chat reps being available over software-release weekends and have had good success with this. Customers get help over the weekend, and reps provide the support coverage via chat from the comfort of their own home! Definitely a win/win !!
Social CRM – whether its blogging, posting a message in a forum, tweeting, or engaging in a social network – focuses on finding ways to help others solve issues and to foster a better relationship with other users. Chat offers similar attributes and will become a critical channel for how users communicate over the Web for support.
Here are some data points on live chat from a recent study by Forrester:
:: 305% ROI from proactive sales chat with a payback period of 6 months (when using paid chat services)
:: 120% ROI from customer service chat with a payback period of 6 months (when using paid chat services)
:: Chat assisted application completion rates 138% higher than self service
:: 59% call deflection rate
Looking at the study results you can be certain of one thing, implementing a live chat solution offers great potential for both sales and service. Providing the additional level of service can also add credibility to the overall customer experience.
Some additional research findings show:
:: Live chat is the most preferred communication method when a visitor is having trouble finding an item, experiencing an error on your website or having difficulties using your online software.
:: Users who have had experience with live chat support tend to come back to purchase more products and become more loyal customers.
:: The X, Y, Z online generation prefers using chat as their choice of communication over all other multi-support channels, including the phone.
:: More than half cited that they are more likely to trust a website that offers live chat and that they in fact prefer to shop at sites that offer the option of live chat.