Category Archives: Group Chat

Customizing Your Live Chat: A Complete Guide

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There are several reasons why most companies are focusing on improving Live Chats in recent times. In addition to improving user experience, Live Chat has become one of the most exciting conversion tools in marketing. It is also considered a transformative customer care tool when it is properly used. 

There is a need to customize your Live Chat Service if you want to get all the benefits it can offer. The goal should be to transform it in a manner that can sustain the relationship between the business and your customers and also optimize it for conversion.

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How Do You Customize Your Live Chat Service? 

Customizing a Live Chat service is more challenging than programming a chatbot. It is more about creating a template that can be followed by your agents than creating instant responses (for chatbots) that don’t really add a human touch to the conversation. 

But how exactly do you create a Live Chat template? You can make use of the most commonly asked questions to create templates that will make communication with customers easier, faster, and more efficient. You will have to create ready-to-use Arena technology scripts (canned responses). 

What Are The Major Benefits Of Live Chat Templates? 

Live Chat templates help in many ways to make the platform more engaging and more productive. Canned responses make it easy for your agents to engage with customers easily and provide the right information. This way, communication is optimized. 

Chat templates also make tool communication faster. A good template will guide your agents to understand customers’ needs faster, communicate better with them, and offer the needed help as soon as possible. It also makes it easy for agents to help customers make purchases or perform any function they intend to perform on your website faster. 

Why It Is Important To Follow a Protocol 

With Live Chat templates, your agents will follow protocol while dealing with customers. Why is this important? Well, it helps to make sure that there is a predictable way to communicate through the Arena technology. This predictability helps to make communication easier, faster, and result-oriented. 

When there is a protocol to follow, Live Chat agents work better. They will be more purpose-oriented, treating each session with a customer with the utmost regard. This, in turn, improves the chances of conversion and makes the experience more pleasant for customers. At the same time, it makes the works of the agents easier and more fulfilling.

Examples of Quick Response Answers and How They Help 

Bellow, we will demonstrate how to customize your platform with examples for different scenarios: 

Greetings and Introduction: 

Customers appreciate a warm welcome to your website and will be more engaged when the agent initiates conversation in a friendly manner; 

“Hello there! My name is Mike. How can I help you today?” 

Asking for More Details 

Sometimes, the agent will need more details from customers to understand their challenges better and provide the perfect solution; 

“Of course, I can help you with that. However, I will need a few more details from you first. What is your…?”

Verifying Your Understanding 

Sometimes, agents will want to be sure of what customers want. It is easier when they ask in a polite and professional way; 

“Let me see if I have this correct: you would like to…” 

Admitting You Do Not Know 

This can be a tricky situation. However, it is important that Live Chat agents politely admit that they ‘don’t know’ when that is the case. This is how best to respond; 

“Sorry, I’m not really sure about it myself. I can talk to someone about it and relay the information to you. Could you please leave me your email or phone number?” 

Transferring to another Live Chat Operator 

Some customers hate being transferred to another operator. When there is a need for that, it is important that the agent handle it in a nice and professional manner like;

“I really need to connect you with my colleague who is more familiar with this situation. I am confident he/she will offer the perfect solution at this point.” 

Putting On Hold 

Sometimes, putting customers on hold is inevitable. It is important, however, that it is done in the most respectable manner. 

“Would you mind holding on for a few moments? I really need to check this with (person or department name)”

Getting Customers to Leave Their Contact Details 

Some customers are reluctant to leave their contact details for any reason. If there is really a need for that, there are nice and professional ways to ask and get the right, positive response:

“I may need to get back to you with something better really soon. Can you please leave your email or phone number right here?” 

Missing a Chat Request 

If your Live Chat agent happens to miss a chat request, it is important that they respond the right way to pacify and engage the customer afresh. This is how it can be done: 

“Hello! I’m really sorry that we missed your chat. How can we help now?” 

Sending Links to External Resources 

Sometimes, your agents may need to direct customers to some resources they really need. This is an example of how to do it politely:

“Please take a look at this webpage:(link), you’ll find it really helpful”.

Handling Complaints 

When a customer makes a complaint through the tool, it is important that your team responds as soon as possible and offers some form of solution. Here is an example of how to do it;

“I’m really, really sorry to hear about that. I understand that it caused you a lot of trouble. Let me see what I can do now to make things right.” 

Wrapping up The Chat 

When the chat is getting to an end, it is important that the operator checks with the customer to see if he/she needs help with anything else: 

“(Customer Name), is there anything else I can assist you with today?” 

Ending the Chat 

When it is time to end the chat, make sure your agents do it in the most professional manner; 

“I am glad I could help today. I wish you a great day!” 

Dealing With Trolls and Confused Customers 

Sometimes, consume customers initiate a session mistaking your company for another. Some other times, online trolls may end up in your platform. Here is a respectful way to reply; 

“I’m sorry you reached the wrong company. We currently have no business or affiliation with the company you have mentioned.” 

Training your Agents to Use the Live Chat Template 

After creating your Live Chat template, it is important that you teach your agents how to use them the right way. They should also learn how to make it personalized and suitable for different customers. You also need to teach them to be disciplined about following protocols. Proper training and monitoring will help you reap all the important benefits of a customized Live Chat service. 

Do you want the best Live Chat service for your company? Try the Arena Live Chat for free now.

How Can Live Chat improve the User Experience?

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Do you need to boost the user experience on your website? Live Chat might be the solution you’ve been looking for.

Make your customer service more personal and become a reference in your field. Read on to find out unique ways Live Chat can increase your website’s experience.

What is Live Chat?

For its power of handling the immediacy of customer services and fulfilling quality buying opportunities, Live Chat became one of the best –– and most wanted –– tools for marketing and sales.

Live Chat is an opportunity generator. The chance of building real connections with the customers can transform a cold purchase moment into a memorable experience. As we know, customer service can be a tremendous competitive advantage for your business.

But to reach an exceptional level, you must know what your audience wants, why they want it, and how they want to get it. Having a Live Chat will help you tailor the most effective approaches and deliver them at the right time.

Added by pasting a simple line code on your website, the Arena Live Chat allows two types of communications:

  1. Passive, when the customer reaches out to the company;
  2. and Active, when the company itself strategically steps in to increase the value of a visited page, of a product, a decisive moment, or even during the purchase.

But Live Chat is not only about interventions or communications. It can also be used to collect important data about the customer’s preferences and behaviors.

As simple as it might look, having proper knowledge on how to correctly use Live Chat can give you guidance –– or even maybe precise answers –– to your audience’s needs before they even realize them.

Thus, your marketing and sales teams can provide a one of a kind service. As a result, you’ll make bigger and better sales. Let’s dive into some of the possibilities to increase user experience on your website through Live Chat.

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The real magnitude of Live Chat

Before we start listing how you can increase user experience on your website using Live Chat, you must understand its real potential for the success of your company. One of the top benefits of Live Chat is its versatility.

This tool has a whole spectrum of possibilities, fitting different needs, segments, platforms, events, and more. All you should keep in mind is how can you better use this new, simple, and clear path of communication with your visitor.

Shape everything you’re about to read to the reality of your own business!

Everything customers need in a single place

Customer service always had a crucial role in all kinds of buying processes, whether in a physical or digital store. To provide great service you must understand what your audience truly wants!

Most websites are overstuffed with things irrelevant to users’ experience, forcing them to leave and search for what they need in the competition without looking back.

No need to shuffle between the website and social media

A simple, yet very frequent, example is when a visitor needs more information about something on your website, doesn’t find any, and goes to social media to look for it.

Regardless of whether this visitor is browsing on your company’s social media page, they are already out of your website. One simple pop up notification and you’re forgotten!

Having Live Chat on your website cuts off visitor’s urge to shift pages searching for further details about something or engagement they need.

Also because your prospect may find not only the answer they need, but other stores, pages, and services as well. Do you realize how damaging this is for your business?

Providing better offers

Customers hate being treated as just another person in line. They’d rather close your tab and look for someone else. Through Live Chat, every touchpoint of your company has the possibility to establish personal conversations on a level that customers realize they are a priority for your brand.

There are countless missed opportunities on automatic responses, lack of personalization, or standardized approaches. But when it comes to Live Chat, the customer service team knows precisely who they are talking to and how to better serve that person.

Designing infallible strategy plans

Now your customers don’t need to leave your website to solve their doubts, you can understand the new length and stages of their individual buyer’s journey. Those two types of approaches mentioned earlier, passive and active, create one of a kind opportunities to aim precisely at your customer’s pain point.

During a Live Chat talk, your teams can gather rich information about the audience to produce meaningful and stronger interactions during their browsing time. Besides creating a much more relevant experience on your website, you also increase the chances of conversion.

Adding more value to live events

Digital events have never been as on popular as today. The importance of creating engagement spaces for the audience through live events promotes not only a moment about generating relevant connections, but also opportunities to increase the value of your website, brand your company as an authority, and close more deals.

All you need to do is set the goals to reach what you want.

Boosting interactions

Regardless of your business segment, using Live Chat on a well-planned event can stimulate the audience to spend more time browsing through the pages of your website.

To create a sort of customer journey, think about the best ways to trigger your visitor to follow your trail of contents, allow them to fortify their perception about you and your product or service.

Whether in a single user room or a Live Group Chat, your strategy team can build up the ideal experience.

Opening group discussion rooms

Speaking of Live Group Chat, the event hosted by you can put together multiple visitors in a single room to discuss, share experiences and opinions about the main subject. Creating a sense of community on your website establishes your place as a point of reference for the audience.

Setting users’ experience this high may permanently increase traffic, bringing more visibility to your brand, as well as producing great referrals out there.

The power of always being available

Business hours are something really incoherent to the digital market. When a customer wants to make a purchase, there is no such thing as a 9-5 period. Services must not be a one size fits all. You have to build your own way to be there for your client whenever they want you.

So, to generate a continuous service through day and night, you can create schedules on-demand or sales calls.

For example, during business hours when the website traffic might be more intense, you can have 4 to 5 attendants. Each one of these customer service agents can engage around 6 or 7 simultaneous chat rooms. At night shift, when traffic might not be high, you can work with 2 attendants.

Knocking down buying objections

It is very common during decision making to pop up a situation that interferes in the buying process. A doubt, a request, a need, or even something more simple: if there is no one to assist or help, do you really think the visitor will stay until they fix the problem by themselves?

Making yourself present while the audience browses through your website reduces the chances of missing opportunities, whether because the visitor needed you or because you spotted a possibility of approaching.

Help the audience get everything they need from your page. Keep in mind that if the answer is not on you, then they will look up somewhere else. And using Live Chat, you have the chance not only to solve situations, but to tailor the response to that specific visitor.

For example, having a Frequent Questions section is great. But does that information really touch the point to make your maybe-customer give you their money? Probably not. But in a Live Chat room, you can literally embrace the opportunity to create the perfect momentum.

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Forms are dying and Live Chat is taking over

If you can give full personalization, why would you step back and deliver only half of it? That’s the feeling about using forms these days. Is it inefficient? No. But it’s not enough anymore. The worst part is that forms are always the same everywhere. Same fields, same information, same shape, same everything.

Collecting data through Live Chat gives you endless opportunities to pick up details like pieces of a puzzle. You build a bigger picture of the person you are talking to. What product or service are they interested in, what are their preferences, what problem are they trying to solve, what are their expectations…

Those are just a few examples of the level of information you can get using Live Chat. There is no way you reach that by only asking for the name, email, and phone number in a form box.

The mighty power of real-time data analysis

What if you could read your client’s minds? Predict their moves and understand what they want before they realize it for themselves. What kind of experience would you deliver?

Reading such things might sound bananas, but it is not! Having real-time data analysis takes you to a level of assertiveness that only big players in the business have.

The visitor’s browsing time can be monitored step by step. What pages are they navigating? What items are they most interested in? Are they recurrent visitors to that same spot? How much time are they spending on you? At what buying stage are they bouncing off?

Answers like those can give insight to marketing and sales teams precisely, like a script. When you track those kinds of moves, you can clearly understand what is really going on in that sale opportunity.  

Combining that with Live Chat, you’ll have the power to take your visitor’s hand and lead them through your funnel all the way to the end. That walk will be constructed according to all data you already have, making it possible to shorten the process to a faster and better sell.

Customer Data Platform and Live Chat

There is no way to mention real-time data analysis without talking about the Customer Data Platform (CDP): a single place to gather information from multiple sources and touchpoints, organizes them into similar matches and creates clusters of customers as precise as a photograph.

The only way to truly know your audience is through data. Everything else is just speculation. Customer Data Platform helps you with the right segmentation, personalizing communication, humanizing your brand’s services and, as a result, increasing revenue. This is the right way to serve the best user experience on your website!

You can use the information provided by CDP to guide the conversation on Live Chat, define the best approach and strategy to use, or you can integrate your CDP to automatically collect data from the Live Chat.

Through both ways, you elevate the chances of conversion by getting to know your audience like no one else in the market has done so far.

Live Chat and Chatbot are not the same thing

If at any point of this reading the idea that Live Chat is the same thing as those automatic stiffed messages you get on most of the websites around, you’re wrong!

Those are called chatbots: responses previously set to “help” customers in need. There is a long list of reasons why we could say Live Chat is a million times better than bots, but we’ll give you just one: chatbot doesn’t have a real person behind the service. Live Chat does!

Nothing can replace the greatness of human interaction. No customer service can reach a level of perfection using the same shape formulas for everybody.

The type of communication your brand must aim for should be based on emotions, empathy, respect, and affection. It is not only about sharing cold dry information, but about understanding what’s between the lines.

Get Arena Live Chat for free

Now you have some of the answers you’ve been looking for to increase your website’s user experience. It is time to take action! We want to see you thriving, making better impressions, expanding the possibilities, and, of course, making more money.

That’s why we are giving you free access to our Live Chat service. You can have as many Live Chat rooms as you want on your website in a matter of seconds.

All you have to do is signing up, embedding a single line of code on the page you want, and start chatting!

Don’t waste more time! Click here and get the Arena Live Chat for free.

Customer service: mistakes, strategy and trends

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Customer service is a must for any business today, and for a reason. Brands need to gain a competitive edge, and winning over the customer is the best way to do so.

It’s not new to say that the customer is a key piece in the business’ success. But for a long time, companies were trying to sell their products at any cost without focusing on the “perfect” customers. Now, that’s the real key: finding the right customers for your product.

While you can convert people that are not exactly ideal, do you know what will happen then? They will probably find something to complain about, say that it wasn’t what they expected or that it didn’t meet their needs.

Still, even in those cases, exceptional customer service will make customers have an overall positive experience.

Common customer service mistakes

Bad customer service will cost your business a lot. Not only will you lose a customer because of that experience, but you also are losing the chance to acquire new consumers that would, otherwise, get a recommendation from that person.

Not being proactive

If you keep waiting for people to reach you and ask about their problems, that’s what we call reactive customer service. Although this is still a good way to offer your support, it’s a mistake not to provide proactive services.

This is about anticipating the customer’s needs. For example, using a chat to ask if the person needs any help.

Not training attendants

You might hire the best and most experienced agents around, that doesn’t discard the necessity of training them to be your employee. They need to learn about the company’s culture, customer service strategy, the product, the protocol you follow for support and sales, etc.

They must receive proper training to perform better at their jobs.

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Having a lack of availability

If you offer customer service online, it’s crucial to be available for the consumers. Can you imagine acquiring a Live Chat feature and not having an agent to answer the conversations? What’s the point of getting a real-time chat tool if you’re not going to take advantage of its prime quality?

You see where I’m going with this, right? It actually doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with phone calls or emails, the client needs to have someone answering them as fast as possible.

Taking too long to answer

On the same note, taking too long to answer will make customers angry and upset. It’s not like speed is the most critical factor. You should take your time looking for the customer’s information since a high-quality service is more important than quick answers.

However, don’t leave them waiting too much. At least send a message: “just one more minute, I’m getting the information for you” if it’s not going as fast as you’d like.

Not listening to the customer

When you listen to the customer, you know exactly what to do, talk, and look for solutions to solve their problems. Even when they ask about something, you might notice they actually want to know something else. You should still answer their question to the point and then complete it with further information.

Customers want to be heard, understood and cared for. More than reading their message, you need to detect their tone of voice. Keeping this in mind, delivering a more personal service will make your brand stand out from peers.

Not having an omnichannel support

Even though Live Chat is currently a crowd favorite, many customers like to have other options to contact the brand. Phone and email are still popular and used by many, though social media has grown a lot these last couple of years.

There are tons of companies using social media chats as an SAQ 2.0 because clients and prospects are always reaching them through this channel. It doesn’t cost you much to offer omnichannel support because you will be rewarded with more satisfied customers.

Not being polite, empathetic, and positive

This one is pretty obvious: you can’t be rude to your customers, even when they’re rude to you. One of the most praised skills of customer service attendants is patience. Alongside that, keeping a positive attitude towards the conversation.

Since customers will react to how you treat them, your support team needs to learn how to be empathetic to understand the customer’s point of view and how to turn it around.

Impersonal customer care

Customers want to feel close to the brands they purchase from. That is probably not new information. Besides, they hate it when brands sound like a robot and treat them like just another person.

That’s why, even when companies have model answers and a protocol to be followed, attendants should edit and personalize the message according to each customer. It will have a huge impact on customer satisfaction.

Not having human agent

In the same context, if you don’t have a human agent to answer the customer questions, your customer service results will be harmed—the same way as being passed around from sector to sector trying to resolve a problem.

Can I tell you about a personal experience? Earlier this year, I ended up with a debt with my phone company and, as I tried to call and negotiate with them, I couldn’t reach a human agent with ANY of the options.

There were six options; none of them were going to resolve my problem, but I tried one by one to talk to an attendant, and it simply wouldn’t happen. At last, I reached them through an online service that, by the way, was also not at all efficient.

The conclusion is: I never want to do business with them again, and that’s how people will feel when you offer this type of poor customer service.

This is what you need to improve your customer service strategy

Overall, to improve your customer service, you need to check that list of mistakes and see what you’re doing wrong today. Once you discover that, you can start to fix and improve your processes.

Some examples of what you need to improve your strategy are:

Although it seems obvious, it’s not so evident for many that you need to put the consumer at the center of your actions to improve your brand’s perception. Every decision should be made based on the customers’ data, principally if you already performed surveys beforehand, use the feedback you got to learn what you need to do.

That being said, putting the customer at the core of your business will reflect on the culture inside the company, which every collaborator needs to know about and follow to provide the best service.

Moreover, you also need to analyze important metrics, such as customer satisfaction, conversion rates, retention rates, churn rate, average resolution time, and average response time, to name a few.

Some tips to boost customer experience

According to a research, 45.9% of businesses say they will focus on customer experience in the next 5  years. This number represents how brands started to notice their product has no value if they don’t provide good service and experience for their consumers.

Which reminds me, even though customer service and customer experience are related, they are not the same thing. While the service part is about customer and brand interactions to, yes, provide a service, experience is more about the entirety of the relationship with the brand.

To clarify, customer service will include a chat conversation, ease on problem-solving, and making purchases easy to complete. Meanwhile, CX will include all of that and more, like sending a surprise small gift after the client made a big purchase.

So, how can you make your Customer Experience better?

Firstly, you need to understand who your customers are, that will make it easier to know how to talk to them, what type of content and offer to make, and what is the best approach to increase conversions.

In addition, it also helps on the next tip: create an emotional connection with your audience. People like it when a brand transmits positive feelings and, although it seems hard to do that, if you follow our first advice, it should be quite simple to communicate with emotion.

I’d also like to mention the importance of getting feedback, both from customers and employees. After all, your collaborators are the ones who are dealing with the clients on a daily basis, so who better to help you learn what are the pain points and what to improve than your own team?

And, of course, you know that the information customers share with you are worth gold, right? That’s the moment they’re talking loud and clear what they want from your brand, some even give suggestions of what you should do — good ideas can come from this practice!

Customer-centric: the strategy of the moment

As I said earlier, being customer-centric is having a business that works with the customers at the center of everything. Every decision made, whether for marketing, sales, or even product development, has to be made thinking about the customer first.

Will they like it? Will it be effective? Will it be worth the investment? All of these questions need to have an answer and you may be wondering how will you know that before anything happens. It’s simple: Customer Data has all the responses.

By understanding behavior patterns, interests, audience engagement, and so on, it’s possible to create a strategy that will be beneficial to the customer and the brand equally.

In spite of this method having become popular in the last years, it’s definitely not a new strategy. It has been around for many years, but now, with the growth of the digital world and the increase of generated data, companies realized they need to stand out for something other than a great product.

Hence, the customer-centric approach gained a new perspective. More than ever before, customers are being considered the most important aspect of a business.

Overview of customer service in 2020 and beyond

This year, customer service in eCommerces suffered a big unexpected impact with the pandemic. Nonetheless, many companies were able to keep quality in their services. From that, we learned a number of trends and predictions for the upcoming year. They are:

  • Higher customer expectations: service needs to be quick, available at all times, personalized, effective, and of high-quality
  • Proactive support: companies started to be more active and look for the customer instead of waiting to see if someone would show up and it has shown amazing results
  • Chatbot and Live Chat: chatbots can help deliver fast answers and sift the problem so the customer can either resolve their issue alone or be transferred to a human agent on Live Chat. This tool that is a new customers’ favorite is essential to provide personalization and fast responses.
  • Predictive analysis: with the growth of data generation, companies understand their consumers better than ever, enough to the point of being able to predict their needs and anticipate solutions
  • Privacy and security: also because of the increase in customer data, the laws of privacy and protection are becoming more strict, for the next years, there’s a tendency to see new, more specific regulations on the subject

At Arena, we offer solutions that will make your customer service shine. I can keep telling you how our thousands of clients worldwide are succeeding in their strategies, but the truth is, each one has particular needs, and so do you.

If you came here, you’re most likely looking for ways to improve your brand’s customer experience as a whole, am I right? With our platform and content just like the one you are reading, you can create an unbeatable strategy that will make you grow and stay ahead of competitors.

The best part is: there’s a free trial period. If you don’t see the results (which I highly doubt will happen), you can just stop using – no cost. Start using the Arena platform for free today!

 

Marketing: why you absolutely need a Live Chat tool

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Live Chat is a tool for instant communication between a brand and its customers. Moreover, it’s a business feature that will make your company convert more visitors and offer better service.

Whether you’re involved with big retailers or small brands, a Live Chat will help you connect to your consumers in the best possible way. Real-time answers are one of the reasons customers love to make deals with companies that offer this tool.

But there’s so much more you need to know about Live Chat, especially since one of the following year’s marketing trends focuses on providing a greater customer experience.

Since we’re on the subject, both things are highly related to each other — but I’ll get into more details later on. Here, I’m also going to tell you everything to understand how to use this feature and create a positive brand perception for your business, plus how to choose the best live chat software.

Just one more thing before you learn all about acquiring a Live Chat as a marketing tool for 2021: it will only take you as far as you’re willing to put your efforts. What does this mean? It’s worth nothing to work with this type of chat if you don’t create a strategy and work to see the most beneficial results it can offer.

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The growth of Live Chat

First, let’s start with some background on this tool. As I said, it is a communication tool, and its purpose is to connect brands with their customers. The concept has been around for many years, but only recently, companies started developing modern software that actually focuses on the customer experience.

Most customers prefer to make deals with companies that offer Live Chat. It’s more practical and convenient for them to talk, ask for help or support from the brand’s attendants.

Because of its many benefits, both for the brand and the customers, this feature has grown exponentially over the last few years. Even though companies still aren’t living the tool to its full potential, the process of adaptation has started.

In fact, many companies know this feature is important, they have a solution for their brand, but they also know they aren’t using it as they should to see the impact Live Chat can have.

Statistics that prove you need a Live Chat

Since it has gained much attention, companies wanted to learn some statistics and understand how important Live Chat really is. After all, numbers and facts are big helpers to make more intelligent and assertive decisions.

After gathering data from several business and customers, these are some examples of statistics that show how Live Chat is growing and making itself a must-have solution:

  • It’s expected to grow as much as 87% in the next months
  • 46% of consumers prefer Live Chat over other communication channels
  • B2B companies saw a 20% increase in conversions after they started using Live Chat
  • This tool is 50% cheaper than phone customer support
  • 79% prefer this channel because they get faster responses

Once again, I’ll repeat that: these numbers are only true if you work to make them that way. For example, customers prefer this chat because conversations are instant and faster than other means, right? So, if your customers are to think that way, you need to make sure attendants will be available to make real-time answers happen.

Do you see what I’m saying? It’s quite simple, really. Use it right, get the results. Leave it to chance, and you’ll be losing money.

How Live Chat and Customer Experience go together

If you haven’t made the connection so far, I will make it clearer for you: Live Chat IS customer experience.

What encompasses customer experience? Mostly, it is about the entire exposure and participation a person will have with your brand. From the first contact to closing a deal, every single moment is considered inside this experience.

And how important is CX? Well, I’ll recur to the statistics here one more time and there are two thing I want to show you:

  1. 96% of consumers say they consider this to be a deciding factor to encourage them into being loyal to a brand
  2. Businesses that focus on customer experience see a revenue up to 8% higher than their competition

CX is about increasing the customer lifetime value as well. The better the experience, the more long-lasting the relationship will be. This means that customers will either buy more frequently or make bigger purchases at once. Whichever happens, each customer will be worth a lot.

You probably know this already, but maintaining a customer is less expensive than acquiring new ones. So make sure to have a proposition to create loyal consumers.

Create a positive brand perception with Live Chat

As you may have noticed, offering good service is also related to how your company is seen through the eyes of the consumers. Are they giving you compliments or complaints? Are they recommending you? Are they coming back or making unique purchases?

Additionally, tracking consumer behavior is vital to understand their connection with the brand. If you know who looked at a product page, who added to the cart and gave up, and so on, you will know what kind of strategy to use as a follow up.

As you gather data, your whole team can analyze the information and have some insights on how to improve marketing, sales, and the customer experience itself.

Why do you need a positive brand perception?

I know this is probably a somewhat foolish question, but it needs to be answered. That’s because you must understand the benefits of having a good word of mouth.

Most decisions nowadays are made based on how your company is known in the market. If people give you good reviews, you’ll have higher chances of getting new customers. However, if your reviews are bad and full of complaints, people won’t think twice before turning to your competitors.

It’s all about increasing customer retention, attraction, and loyalty.

How is this related to Live Chat?

You’ve seen above how Live Chat and CX are part of the same thing. Which means, when you give customers a good service through this feature, it will pay off in customer satisfaction.

Once you get clients to be happy with what you give them throughout interactions, they will be more likely to talk you up. In reality, 89% of consumers say they would recommend a brand after a positive experience.

Hence, your brand will start getting recognition and be more attractive to make deals with.

What to do with your Live Chat to enhance CX and brand perception?

Simply put: you need to humanize your service. Create a real connection, asking and answering questions without sound like a pre programmed machine — one of the reasons why Live Chat is surpassing chatbots too.

Of course, you can use chatbots when your agents are so busy the response time will be longer. In these cases, your can program the bot to say “hi, an agent will be available in 3 minutes, would you like to wait or can I help you in the meantime?”.

Besides, you should always ask for feedback from your conversations. When problems are resolved, ask the customer if they can help you by answering a few quick questions about the service they just got.

This is good to see what worked, what needs to improve, and to get to know your consumer better as well.

Summing up: why you need a Live Chat for 2021

Now, I just wanted to make a short list that will give you all the reasons to acquire a Live Chat for your marketing plans for 2021. That is:

  • increase customer retention
  • enhance customer engagement
  • improve your marketing strategies with proactive service
  • increase your revenue by using Live Chat for sales strategies
  • give the best customer experience
  • improve your brand image
  • increase lead conversions

How to choose the best Live Chat software

“What do I need to consider to choose a Live Chat?” is a question that may have crossed your mind. And I will tell you what you need to know.

Features

What are the features the software has? Does it offer proactive chat? Does it have visitor monitoring options? Will your customers be able to use it through mobile? This is all important to ponder when you’re choosing a Live Chat solution for your business.

You shouldn’t go with the software that has more features. It’s necessary to check their quality and make your decision based on real facts.

Security

Will your information be safe inside this software? What about data from your customers? The last thing you want is a data leakage incident.

Make sure to be hiring a trustable Live Chat system.

Support

Since this tool is likely to suffer updates and renewals along time, you might encounter some difficulties to use it. Will there be a support team to answer your questions when that happens?

It’s very important to receive support. If they keep you waiting, it means you’ll be keeping your own customers waiting. And we don’t want that, do we?

Pricing

I wouldn’t say the price itself is the most important factor, but the cost benefit your chosen system has. Is it worth its price? How long will it take for the tool to “pay itself”? What’s the ROI for the software?

Have these questions answered, even if through projection, and put it to weight on your decision.

Customization

Not everyone takes this into consideration, but I find it crucial. Will you be able to put your own twist on the looks of the chat? Personalize colors? Use logo and create agent profiles?

Remember to learn more about this element before making your final decision. Keeping your brand’s image and visual identity on the chat is a matter of consistency.

Reports

Is the software you have your eye on checking all of these items? Here’s one more you need to rock off: team productivity reports.

To understand how your service is going, what needs to be done and who needs more training can be read in monthly reports the Live Chat system can offer you.

That is, considering the software you chose actually offers this feature.

How about you give a chance to Arena Live Chat?

At Arena, we can offer you everything that has been talked about and even more. To learn more about our solutions, simply go to our products page.

However, if you are already interested and ready to start reaping our Live Chat’s benefits, go ahead and start your free trial period. You’ll have up to 14 days to learn all about our tool, how to use it, and see how fundamental it is to your business.

Customer Service Strategies to amaze your customers

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52% of consumers say they have made an additional purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience. You know Customer Service Strategies are essential, but do you know what makes them remarkable?

That’s what I want to tell you here. First of all, a good customer service strategy implies having a satisfied client base. For that, you need to create a good relationship.

And what defines these relationships? It can be how you communicate, the information you make available on your pages, the means of payment, you offer, and more. Every interaction you have with a customer classifies as part of the customer service you offer.

It’s clear that there’s a big connection with customer experience, right? Moreover, I’ll still talk in more detail about:

  • what is customer service
  • what defines good customer service
  • how offering good customer service will make your business thrive
  • what does it take to create a good customer service strategy

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Here’s the definition of Customer Service

When we talk about customer service, we’re talking about the relationship between a brand and its consumers. Generally, people consider mostly communication as the most important factor, but services include much more.

That is, including the buying experience, how easy is it to go from the product page to the checkout cart, how fast the shipping is, the variety of payment options, etc.

The title “customer service” is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s still good to make it as clear as possible in order to create a better customer service strategy for your company.

After all, when you provide good customer service, you provide a good experience, thus you create a happy customer. That’s the ultimate goal for any business!

These are the characteristics that will establish good Customer Service Strategies

Provide easy communication channels

Overall, email and telephone were, and still are, two very popular ways for the customer to reach the company. But, recently, Live Chat is becoming the new favorite channel of consumers. That’s because it’s easy to use and it’s fast service, a combination everyone loves.

Companies that offer a Live Chat service are more likely to have comeback customers, so what are you waiting for? Go and install this feature on your eCommerce now!

Give fast responses

On the same note, and one of the reasons for the Live Chat success is that customers want to have their problems dealt with in real-time. I’ll paint a picture for you because the similarity is big:

You go in-store to ask an attendant about a discount that wasn’t consummated on your purchase and when you get there there’s a huge line! Are you happy to have to face that? Most likely not, right? Nobody is thrilled when that happens, people don’t want to wait to have their problems solved. They want to arrive, ask, get answers, and go home.

So, when customers go online, it’s the same feeling. If people don’t like to wait in person, why would they like it online? It just makes sense that you provide instant communication for your customers.

Offer high-quality service that actually solves a problem

Still on that matter, and adding in some praiseworthy information: it’s worth nothing to give fast responses and not resolve the customer’s problems. Did you know most people would rather wait a couple of minutes to have their questions answered than to have quick, shallow answers?

It’s okay if you say “just a minute, I’ll check that information” and take that minute to actually do something that will help the customer. Way better than giving a 7-second response saying that you can’t do anything about that problem, or giving a robotic answer followed by a “was that helpful?” question.

That being said, our next topic is highly related to this subject:

Work on personalization

There are a few things that make customers angry. For example: being thrown from agent to agent trying to solve a problem, taking too long to solve a problem, and being treated like just another person.

The truth is people want to feel close to the brand they buy from. So, if you put an effort into making communication (and the entire experience) more personalized, results will pay off. Of course, there must be a protocol or model answers to be followed, but giving that personal touch when sending these messages to the customers is crucial.

Know about the product

There are three main teams inside a company that are directly related to the customer: support, sales, and marketing. For that reason, all of them should know every little thing about the company’s product.

Let me explain each one a little bit better:

  • The support team needs to be able to answers questions about problems happening with the product, as well as show benefits and use cases when required
  • The marketing team needs to know the product to show the audience appealingly what they will be acquiring
  • And the sales team needs to know the product to sell it and close more deals.

Do you see the importance of everyone knowing the company’s product or service in detail? Great! Let’s go to the next topic:

Stay positive & use creativity

In general, customers respond to the attendant’s tone of voice and feeling surpassed in the conversation. So if you keep a positive attitude even when a person starts a conversation angry or upset, it’s likely that things will turn out okay in the end.

Besides, attitude is highly related to the use of creativity. It’s not only the marketing sector that needs to use this trait to improve their work, but this is also a skill required for support and sales too.

This way, when you go out of your way to solve a problem for your consumer, they will reward you with loyalty and commitment.

Allow self-solving problems

What does “self-solving problems“mean? Well, many customers prefer and try to look for the answer to their problems on their own before contacting an agent. Because of this, you should make it easy for customers to do that whenever possible.

FAQs, most asked questions, mini-tutorials, and so on, all of these will help your customer to deal with their issues. So, allow them to find information within a few clicks and they will be more satisfied with your service.

Listen to the consumer

When you pay attention to what the customer is saying you will be able to know them thoroughly and start to anticipate their needs. It’s quite common that a person comes with a specific question, but they really want to know something entirely different.

So it’s essential to listen to the consumer and find the best way to be proactively helpful. That means, to help them before they even know they need help. Whether that is by sending a newsletter, a discount, or a small gift.

Deliver as promised

This is definitely of the top 3 most important rules of customer service strategy: deliver as promised. The bottom line is you can’t say you do or have something and then let down your public because that wasn’t true.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant, saw the perfect plate on the menu, and when you asked for it the waiter said they ran out of an ingredient and weren’t producing that dish for the moment? That’s a huge disappointment and I’m sure you’d think twice before going back to that restaurant again.

 It’s because of these not-so-small details that are essential, of ultimate importance, that you deliver what you promise.

How offering good customer service makes an impact on your business

Loyal customers, longer lifetime value, increase in conversions, lower acquisition costs…is this enough for you, or do you still want more benefits for your company? I’m just naming some of the main advantages of improving your customer service strategy because let me tell you, THERE IS more to it.

For instance, people are always posting on social media about their likes and dislikes, and it’s easy to be noticed for either good or bad customer service. New customers will take into account what other people are saying about your brand, especially if they’re close friends, family, or influencers.

I’d also like to mention here that a bad experience is hard to come back from. If a customer gets poor service, he or she will talk about it and people will avoid buying from your brand. This way, the efforts you make to acquire new customers will most likely increase because of it.

Additionally, when you provide good customer service, you may be getting a great opportunity to increase your prices a little bit. In fact, most customers would rather pay more for better service, than to have lower prices and no help at all from the brand when they face a problem with the product.

Now, I could keep going and talk even more about the impacts on your business, but I’d still like to tell you more about what it takes to deliver the best customer service. So, carry on:

Everything you need to deliver great customer service

To know how to create an efficient customer service strategy, you need to first know what this is and what makes customer service stand out as excellence. So far, we have already got that covered for you so far. Then, you need to understand what attributes will help you provide in this matter.

For starters, you need to work with Customer Data, can’t get away from that these days. And why do you need it? To know who is your consumer. That’s another factor that you need to deliver the best customer service in the market.

When you know who you’re talking and selling to, it becomes easier to create content, offers, and promotions that will genuinely impact the customers.

One thing that will help you gather and organize customer data is the Customer Data Platform, it’s the most complete tool there is out there for this purpose. It gathers, selects, and stores all sorts of data. Even more, it can help you create a persona profile, segmentation groups, and so much more.

Finally, you need to hire a good Live Chat platform. As mentioned earlier, having this type of close and instant communication with the customer will give you lots of positive reviews. That way, you can hire the best Live Chat service around because there is no doubt it will give you a great return on investment.

Where to get the best tool, you ask?

Arena has thousands of clients all around the world that use our solutions, including companies like Fox Sports, Microsoft, and Sony Music. 

We are offering a FREE TRIAL PERIOD for our Live Chat. Did I get your attention? Well, then start using our tool and see for yourself your new results!

How to enhance Customer Experience with Live Chat

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Do you ever feel like your company could have an upgrade in Customer Service? Or that you could sell more and drive more engagement if Customer Experience was a little better on your website? Trust me, this feeling is more common than you would expect.

Companies might have good services and products, but the truth is “good” is not enough in today’s competitive scenario. Most brands rely on standardized approaches and interactions that are impersonal and time-consuming both for your customers and Customer Support agents.

Think about the “love brands” worldwide: Amazon, Apple…you name it. They all have great Customer Experience (CX) and go beyond the basics in customer support. Actually, most of them offer one thing in common: Live Chat. 

Live Chat can be used across many steps in the Customer Experience, whether to answer questions about products and services or to assist customers after a purchase. Another trend is to use Live Chat proactively to display personalized messages and offers while the customer is browsing. 

In this post, you will learn all about Live Chat and how to use it to drive customer loyalty and more business results.

What is Live Chat?

You probably might have bumped into Live Chat on websites before. Live Chat is a messaging tool strategically designed for Customer Experience in real-time. It is usually placed in the Customer Support section or as a discrete pop-up button that shows up while you’re browsing. 

Some people might confuse Live Chat with a Chatbot, but there is a slight difference between them. While Chatbots work only with automated answers, Live Chat is a tool used by human agents instead. 

Some Live Chat sessions can start with automated messages, like greetings and basic introductory questions, but then the customer is routed to an actual human professional. 

Live Chat can serve many purposes, from Customer Support to Sales and Marketing. The classic way of using it is in Customer Service, where the approach is mostly reactive. That means the Customer starts the conversation in order to solve some problem.

Live Chat can also be used for cross-selling and retargeting tactics in a proactive way – when your agents start the conversation, not the customer. 

Why should you pay attention to Live Chat software? 

Live Chat has become the new standard in Customer Service, and companies from all segments have relied on it to provide high-level engagement and humanized interactions with customers. From e-commerce to media brands, Live Chat offers the possibility to optimize companies’ communication channels and improve customer experience (CX) altogether.

Think about your company. It is likely your brand has multiple direct and indirect Customer Service touchpoints, from email to social media, for example. Sometimes it might be hard to manage requests coming from different places in a fast, efficient way. 

Live Chat can be a cure for this pain point and act as a hub for customers, allowing them to solve doubts and requests quickly without having to leave to other channels. From a business standpoint, Live Chat can help you give life to omnichannel strategies and optimize service costs.

Imagine answering (and solving!) customer requests in a single chat session with Live Chat, with no more back and forth emails and lengthy calls. Trust me, your support agents and customers will thank you!

What about the outcomes of adopting Live Chat? You can expect an increase in support team productivity and Net Promoter Score (NPS) —  which ultimately means more customer loyalty and good referrals. 

Other benefits of Live Chat include:

Non-intrusive communication

Live Chat allows your brand to be available 24/7 in a non-intrusive way, once the customer can call out for an agent whenever he needs without being flooded by emails and phone calls. 

Personalization

Personalized messages are key if you want to engage customers and surpass their expectations. With  Live Chat, you can serve a more personal approach instead of serving customers with standard and automated messages. In fact, research shows that people prefer to talk to real human agents instead of chatbots.

By integrating Live chat with other platforms, such as CRM and Customer Data Platforms, your support team can know the customer’s name, buying history, and more! With that type of information in mind, it gets much easier to personalize messages and fasten problem resolution.

Productivity

Do you want to offer top-notch customer support and still make customer service more efficient? Live Chat is the perfect tool for that. To get an idea, a Live Chat attendant can handle 6x more customers at once compared to a phone agent.

Some brands take this optimization to the next level and categorize Live Chat options for different types of customer issues, just so the customer is routed to the right agent before the conversation even starts. We’ll show you a few use cases later on in this post.

Customer Support and Live Chat: statistics behind this combination

If you are considering a Live Chat tool for your company, you probably want to quantify the type of results you can get from it. You will need to justify the investment to your boss, after all. 

We have gathered some data that clarifies the potential of Live Chat for your business and customer experience:

  • While e-mails get 61% of customers satisfied with Customer Service, and phone calls get 44%, Live Chat gets up to 73% of customers satisfied.
  • 63% of customers said they are more likely to return to a website if Live Chat is available.
  • 83.1% is the average customer satisfaction rate globally with Live Chat.
  • When asked about what made them happy in Live Chat support, 79% of customers said they like this type of support channel because of the real-time component, while 51% said it was because they can multitask while talking to the support agent.

Live Chat Examples

There are many examples of companies that are using Live Chat in a creative way. Some are more sophisticated and others are simpler, but all serve the same purpose: improve customer experience and customer service. Let’s look at a few successful cases below:

Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger’s plugin is perhaps one of the most common Live Chat integrations for businesses. It was launched in 2017 as a way to connect brands to their customers via Messenger, which is widely used by the audience. 

By opting in via their Facebook account, customers can ask questions and communicate with brands, without having to reach out via the company’s website. Facebook’s plugin, along with tools like WhatsApp Business, aligns with Facebook’s strategy to provide more and more services dedicated to corporate communication management.

Facebook Messenger’s integration can represent an important source of insights for companies, and even a good channel to start Customer Service procedures. The bad news is that the plugin’s interface is very basic and doesn’t allow much personalization from CX managers. 

Besides, your company cannot let multiple agents work from the same Facebook account, use response templates, or assign a conversation to the most suitable support agent in your team. While Facebook Messenger can be a great tool to start a conversation, you can take better advantage of it by combining it to more complete, integrated Live Chat tools.

Amazon’s Live Chat 

Amazon is certainly one of the global benchmarks when it comes to Customer Experience and Support. It embodies the “customer-centric” mindset, and Amazon’s Live Chat reflects that as well. It is no coincidence Amazon has one of the best customer service ratings in the industry.

The company offers a variety of support options: customers can browse through FAQs lists about popular topics, quick solutions, and a community forum. That is very helpful not to waste agents’ time with common questions that are easy to solve in a self-service model. 

Then, if customers can’t find the answer to their doubts in Amazon’s knowledge base, they can reach out to a real person via Live Chat. 

Users are routed to support specialists according to different request categories. How it works: 

the customer can choose the topic he wants to chat about (memberships and subscriptions, ordering and shopping preferences, Login & Security, etc) before being redirected to a specialized agent. 

By narrowing down the customer’s case, Amazon optimizes Live Chat sessions and agents can go straight to the point in the conversation, improving the overall customer experience. The combination of real-time service and FAQs provides a great balance, just so the customer can solve simple doubts on his own and reach out to human agents for more complex issues. 

Apple’s Live Chat

Known for its great service design, Apple is also on the list of companies that use Live Chat for Customer Service. On Apple’s Support Page, the user can choose the product or service he is having issues with.

From there, the customer can choose to talk via phone or Live Chat to an Apple expert who specializes in their exact area of request. Everything happens within Apple’s website, so the customer doesn’t have to send requests through other channels and wait too long to solve their problems.

That’s a great example of how intuitive and specific Live Chat can be, helping solve customers’ unique needs in a convenient way.

Arena’s Live Chat: why you should test it to enhance your Customer Experience strategy

After showing a few use cases to inspire you, let me introduce you to Arena’s Live Chat, one of the most complete tools in the market. It might be difficult to choose a Live Chat tool that best suits your needs, but Arena has a flexible and intuitive enough to help any company, no matter the size and complexity.

Let’s explore some of  Arena’s Live Chat features:

  1. Multifunctional Live Chat

Our Live Chat tool can be used in different formats to better suit your engagement strategy. Arena offers the classic one-on-one Live Chat tool, used in Customer Support and proactive Sales, but also a Live Group Chat tool that can be used for specific events or permanent discussions, like a community forum.

If your brand generates proprietary content, for instance, it can use Live Group Chat to engage audiences in blogs and Live Blog pages, for instance.

  1. Simple Setup

Setting up Arena a Live Chat tool is super simple, all you have to do is paste a line of code on your website to embed it to your page. Our tool also works both on desktop and mobile pages, including Google AMP, and supports more than 17 languages. 

  1. Scalable

Arena’s Live Chat can help you handle Customer Service no matter the scale of your company. Our enterprise-grade platform will handle chatrooms with thousands of hundreds of concurrent users, so your support team doesn’t have to worry about the stability and availability of the program. 

  1. Customizable

Our tool allows you to choose where you want the Live Chat to be displayed on your website, and also customize it to match your brand’s identity and design.

  1. Social Features

Unlike other cold Live Chat tools, Arena’s Live Chat tools are somewhat similar to messaging apps customers are used to.  It has social features to make communication between your agents and customers more dynamic and personal, such as emojis and avatars. 

  1. Control Dashboard

Our Live Chat tool offers a complete dashboard to help your team control chat rooms. With such a dashboard, your agents can see which customers are online, moderate, and delete messages if they need to. 

Try a free live chat now

If you think it is time to adopt Live Chat support in your company, why not start with Arena?  The best part is that you can try our Live Chat tool for free! Click here to access our free trial and upgrade Customer Service in your business.

Live Chat: Shorten Sales Cycle & Improve CX

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If you want to close deals faster and improve the customer buying journey, Live Chat can be an excellent tool for your sales team. Find out why!

Sales funnels are at the core of business strategies nowadays, whether your company sells B2C products or sells software, equipment, or services in the B2B market. Having the right sales channels will help you guide leads and prospects through the conversion process.

Companies of all sizes have tried hard to fasten the sales cycle and shorten the path that leads customers to get to know a brand to buy from it.

That’s understandable, considering that just a slight tweak in the sales funnel can positively affect a company’s bottom line.

Think about it: the less time a customer spends in your sales funnel, the more return on investment (ROI) he or she generated for you!

But how can you shorten the sales cycle without rushing your customers? Well, Live Chat can be a great way to engage with qualified prospects at the right time and with the right messages, helping to guide them faster towards the purchase.

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Live Chat combines the convenience and real-time experience expected by empowered audiences while also serving as a gatekeeper for your sales team. After all, not every customer on your website is mature enough to convert or start a conversation with sales reps.

In this blog post, we will explore how Live Chat can shorten the sales cycle and the importance of doing so. Read on to find more about the advantages of Live Chat in the sales funnel.

What is the sales cycle?

The sales cycle is the process that comprehends all the touchpoints between your company and potential customers, from the very first contact until the deal is closed.

The sales funnel describes the steps needed to create awareness around your brand, make your prospects considerate buying from you, and then convert. This process can be described through AIDA’s acronym (awareness, interest, desire, action).

The sales Funnel also includes your entire team’s effort to create and maintain interest in your products, engage; potential customers, answer their doubts, and finally sell to them.

How can Live Chat shorten the sales cycle?

Reducing the Sales Cycle is about helping customers find the information they need at any time and help them understand your product before you sell to them. Live Chat empowers the customer and relies on conversational commerce, which can help warm up your leads until they are ready to buy.

According to CrazyEgg;, 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer Live Chat. Besides, Forrester; noted a 10% increase in the average order value when reviewing the sales from customers who used Live Chat before making a purchase, compared with those who did not use it.

A few ways Live Chat can help you shorten the Sales Cycle:

Faster feedback to marketing

Let’s say you have a two-month sales cycle time. That means it will take a lot more time for the marketing team to understand which marketing tactics worked or not for a given group of customers that converted in that period.

Live Chat gives you the possibility to get quicker feedback (in real-time) and then reinforce the marketing strategies that led to better results so far.

Efficiency for B2B Sales Teams

Live Chat is particularly great for B2B companies that wish to streamline their prospection activities since it works as a gatekeeper to filter qualified leads.

In the traditional sales model, the sales cycle is a back and forth process: the customer discovers the website and fills out contact forms. A sales representative then reaches out via e-mail or phone call without fully understanding the customer’s needs.

What if sales reps could make a more assertive approach towards prospects? Live Chat can undermine inefficiencies by helping your company start a personalized conversation with the customer.

A real-time chat combines the engagement level and immediacy of a phone call while still allowing your sales reps to manage more than one conversation at once.

That way, you can understand initial questions and objections in real-time before even having a more in-depth conversation with a client. Live Chat can replace some boring contact and assessment forms since initial client diagnosis can be made directly through the Chat, shortening the Sales Cycle.

Better conversion rates in e-commerce

When it comes to; e-commerce, it might sound tempting to assume that your visitors will browse your website on their own, find exactly what they want, be satisfied with the information provided, and then go straight to the checkout process. However, that’s not necessarily how it happens.

More often than not, customers will have doubts about products, payment methods, pricing, and shipping, sometimes leaving your website to search for other options and then eventually come back to make the purchase.

Incorporating proactive Live Chat in e-commerce websites creates a real-time space for customers to ask questions and find complementary information. Altogether, it can help reduce friction in the buying journey and move your customer quicker through the sales funnel.

Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

Once a prospect is engaging via Live Chat, there is no need to put them through the pipelines of your funnel. Live Chat can help you skip them straight to the conversion stage.

Of course, there must be a good strategy behind the conversational flow. It can still be an effective way to reduce costs with social selling and other intrusive marketing channels, allowing you to skip a few steps usually necessary until the purchase.

Live Chat might seem like just a simple resource, but it can be a powerful tool to engage customers and reduce Customer Acquisition costs through the funnel.

Fasten upselling and cross-selling processes

Shortening the sales cycle is not about being pushy or rushing the customer to close a deal. In that sense, Live chat can help you build trust and provide customers with helpful information for their unique needs – resulting in a shorter and more efficient sales cycle.

Beyond optimizing the Sales Cycle for one service or another, Live Chat is useful to perform cross-selling and upselling strategies. With a proactive approach, your sales agents can offer complementary products related to customers’ interests and products they were initially looking for.

As a result, companies that use Live Chat tend to increase average order value and faster ROI in shorter periods.

Let’s say you run a media company, and a customer wants to sign up for a live conference you’re organizing. When he goes to the checkout page to pay for his badge, you could use Live Chat to send a personalized message recommending an essential content subscription with a discount. That logic applies to any industry and niche.

How are brands using Live Chat throughout the sales cycle?

Are you still skeptical about how much Live Chat can help shorten the sales cycle?; A study by AMA found that live chat can be used effectively throughout the entire customer journey.

The study shows that:

  • 29% of companies are using Live Chat for marketing awareness
  • 32% of companies are using Live Chat for early-stage sales development
  • 39% of companies are using Live Chat for the post-sales customer support

8 steps to use Live Chat to reduce the sales cycle and close more deals

As great as it is, Live Chat won’t just magically shorten your Sales Cycle from the moment you implement it. Your team should have a well-thought sales strategy that uses Live Chat as a key touchpoint with the customer, considering many variables.

Here are a few steps to make the best out of Live Chat for your sales cycle.

  1. Understand how long is your sales cycle

The basic step is to understand how long your company’s average sales cycle is. That might seem like an obvious recommendation, but many salespeople have never stopped to think about it.

It is important to consider different customer segments and products and then establish parameters of what your team considers a short or long sales cycle. From there, you can set up a strategy for improvements.

  1. Make sure your Live Chat is mobile-friendly

Live Chat is usually built for websites and with desktop navigation in mind. However, you should make sure your Live Chat is also easy to access through mobile devices, to offer your buyers a great; customer experience.

Customers who are ready to buy want to be able to buy quickly from mobile devices, and the same expectation exists when it comes to getting help or information through Live Chat.

  1. Bring different content formats to Live Chat

Many people think of corporate and e-commerce Live Chat as a text-only channel, when in fact, many Live Chat tools offer you the chance to incorporate video chat, voice chat, and formats like maps, forms, and spreadsheets embedded into conversations.

When you have different resources within the chat, it’s easier to target personalized messages and answer doubts from visitors, which ultimately can help them make purchase decisions faster.

  1. Rout customers to the right sales or support agents

There is no use adopting Live Chat to optimize your sales cycle if you’re routing customers to the wrong department or sales representative. Agents should be well-trained and equipped to handle specifics about products and services your offering, payment, and onboarding processes, pricing, etc.

That is something you should be careful about, especially if your company deals with extensive portfolios and many business units.

  1. Plan different steps of the conversation

If you truly want to use Live Chat to close deals faster, it’s important to have a well-mapped conversation flow for each stage of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, conversion😉 and each of your buyer personas. Consider the most frequent doubts and stages for each stage in the journey and customer segments that you would like to reach.

What kinds of materials and information they would want to have access to? What is the best language for each buyer persona? Having those aspects in mind, you can better train sales agents and be prepared to guide customers to the next stage.

  1. Don’t keep Live Chat data in silos

This one is crucial. Live Chat might be an excellent starting point with a potential customer, but you need to make sure data generated from chat sessions are integrated into other sales management platforms.

Live Chat allows you to gather valuable information about the customer profile and his pain points, so it’s thoughtful to have Live Chat software integrated into Customer Relationship Management Platforms (CRM) and Customer Data Platforms (CDP), just so your sales and marketing team can understand the full picture about a customer and set the best strategy to follow up with them.

  1. Use Live Chat triggers to encourage customers to take action

There are many triggers you can use to send proactive messages in Live Chat and help customers move through the sales funnel faster. you can send messages about coupons, events, discounts, free items, and sensitive offers that are related to their profile.

  1. Have clear next steps

At last, it’s not enough just to show you have a great value proposition via Live Chat. To truly shorten the Sales Cycle, your team needs to take advantage of Live Chat to indicate CLEAR next steps for the customer.

Does he need a second round of conversation with sales agents? Does he need to complete an assessment? Does he need to proceed to the checkout page? Make sure you use Call to Actions (CTAs) and the right language to guide him through the next steps.

Conclusion

Are you interested in the potential of Live Chat to optimize your Sales Cycle? Maybe your company already uses Live Chat in Customer Support, or perhaps it’s still figuring out how to incorporate it in its website.

Either way, you can experiment with Live Chat little by little and then adjust it to your Sales operation.

Arena has one of the most complete Live Chat solutions on the market, with many features to help you personalize your sales approach.

Request your free trial today and see how Live Chat can optimize your sales funnel like never before.

11 great reasons to add Live Chat to your website

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Live Chat is a powerful tool to make your brand more competitive in the era of convenience. Find out why!

Live chat once used to be something optional for companies’ websites. It was just an additional channel to email and phone support. But things have changed in the last few years and Live Chat has become the standard channel for Customer Care and Sales strategies.

Customer-centric; brands know that customers are increasingly demanding due to the mobile culture, which compels them to adapt their customer service channels to meet customers’ expectations.

Adding Live Chat to your website can dramatically improve the; customer experience, no matter the industry your company is in.;

A 2018 survey from Bold 360 found out that 71% of respondents believe that Live Chat will surpass traditional customer service communication channels by 2021.

But what makes Live Chat so powerful? Well, it essentially makes interactions much better for the final customer and customer support teams.

After all, these days, people are hesitant to pick up the phone or send emails asking for support while knowing they’ll face lengthy holds and long response times. On the other hand, traditional channels can make support teams feel pressured and overwhelmed with demands that pile up and take too long to resolve. 

The result? Both your customers and your support team might end up frustrated, ultimately damaging your business operations and reputation. And you don’t want to lose conversions and customer loyalty because of a bad support experience. 

With a website’s Live Chat feature, there is no waiting queue, no holds, and you can offer immediate answers. Seems like the best way to go, huh? 

Let’s explore the advantages of adding Live Chat to your website.

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What is Live Chat?

Live Chat is a window that allows customers to chat instantly with a company’s sales, support agent, or chatbot directly on their website. The Live Chat can be shown in the support section or as a pop-up window that appears while the customer is browsing.

Live Chat can be reactive, serving as a tool to answer questions only when requested by customers, or it can be proactive, allowing brands to start the conversation and guide the customer’s experience. 

Live Chat makes communication between brands and their customers much more natural as it simulates messaging platforms. Some Live Chat tools might even be integrated into messaging apps that customers use daily, like Facebook Messenger, What’ sApp, etc.  

One of the best things about Live Chat is that it allows customers and support agents to multitask. Customers can keep browsing products and the website while talking to the agent, while agents can handle multiple customers at a time without getting stuck in phone calls, for instance. 

According to a study from; E-Consultancy, 51% of customers prefer Live Chat to other channels exactly because it allows them to multitask. 

Live Chat can be used by companies in different sectors, from marketplaces, online retailers, entertainment, and media companies.

There will be a real agent behind the Chat most of the time, while some companies are already testing fully automated bots or hybrid systems, which mix both formats.

The advantages of Live Chat for Business

There are many benefits of adding Live Chat to your website, from a customer’s perspective and a business efficiency point of view. 

Here is a list of advantages of Live Chat:

1 – Convenient Customer Support

When it comes to high-quality customer service, accessibility and timing are key factors to offer a great customer experience. Combine these two elements and you’ll have convenience, which is one of the main drivers of the digital economy.

Users have become used to having access to content, products, and services with only a few clicks. That logic also applies to how customers solve problems and ask for help, so why would customer support be any different?

Adding a Live Chat to your website makes support requests very intuitive and convenient for customers. They don’t have to send and follow up on lengthy emails or stay on hold in phone calls, instead can easily get all their requests solved in a single chat session. 

2 – Better Customer Experience

Maybe a decade ago your brand could get along well without Live Chat, but that is no longer the case. According to research from Forrester, 41% of customers expect Live Chat on companies’ websites. For customers that visit websites on a mobile device, this number is; as high as 50%.

Live chat has become the leading digital contact channel, as 46% of customers prefer Live Chat compared to just 29% for email, and 16% for social media.

3 – Reduce customers’ waiting time

According to a; study by Zendesk, 66% of customers expect immediate responses or resolution in Customer Support, and more traditional support channels obviously cannot live up to those expectations.

To get an idea, the average response time for emails is 12 hours, according to a study from Super Office, while it’s 10 hours for social media. Imagine making anxious customers wait that long! With Live Chat, users can get answers to their questions in two minutes, says the same study.

Remember time is the most valuable asset for people nowadays, so if your brand wants to be helpful, it shouldn’t make customers wait for too long. 

Actually, another research from Zendesk shows that the most popular pain point experienced with support teams is to be placed on hold for too long: about 42% of the respondents described it as frustrating.

4 – Increase Customer Service Efficiency

If your goal is to increase work efficiency in Customer Service, Live Chat is a great option for your company. While presenting a convenient communication channel on your own website, it allows support agents to handle multiple cases at a time and solve them right away, increasing productivity. 

Live Chat also brings easier transitions between cases. As one chat ends, another pops up, and the agent doesn’t have to pick up a phone or dial a number, for example. In addition, Live Chat allows you to rout customers to the right agents and departments according to the requests they tell at the beginning of the chat session. 

You could have standard automatic answers to find out customers’ doubts, and then redirect them to the right agent that will handle the request. 

As a result, Live Chat can boost important Customer Service KPIs such as first response time (FRT), average queue time, number of chats answered, Average Resolution Time (ART), etc.

5 – More Cost-Effective

By increasing the support team’s potential to take on more support cases, your business can optimize costs with Customer Care, hiring fewer agents, and spending much less time and money with phone calls and emails.

Imagine the difference it can make during busier times, like Black Friday or special dates, when usually companies have to hire many more agents.

Live chat also gives you the possibility of implementing chatbots to automate part of the job and resolve less-complicated requests.

No matter your company’s approach towards customer service, if it’s totally human, hybrid, or automatized, you’ll certainly have a more cost-effective operation with Live Chat. 

6 – Drive more revenue from qualified customers

Companies are realizing that Live Chat has the potential to really help them grow their businesses by increasing lead conversion rates. While many use Live Chat only for Customer Support, an interesting option is to use it proactively to drive engagement on your website.

You can use Live Chat to suggest personalized content and products to customers while they browse, increasing the time spent on your website and even your revenue. After all, proactive Live Chat is all about offering targeted relevant messages to trigger qualified customers who are ready to buy or; engage with your brand.

A study shows that customers who spend between $250 and $500 a month online; are the most likely to be influenced by the availability of a website with Live Chat. Around 63% of those big-spend consumers are more likely to buy from companies that offer Live Chat support. 

7 – Increase customer loyalty 

Try to think like the customer: if a company has a personalized approach towards your problems and treats you as a unique individual, even at a general channel such as a website, you’re likely to come back to see what they’ve got for you, right? 

This is not just an impression and Live Chat has actually proven to drive more customer loyalty. A study; by Emarketer discovered that 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers Live Chat.

8 – Improve Customer Satisfaction Rates

An immediatist culture requires quick and efficient answers, and that’s what makes customers satisfied. By incorporating Live Chat into your website, you will likely increase overall customer satisfaction rates.

According to LiveChat’s 2019 Customer Service Report, the percentage of satisfied Live Chat users is currently at 82% based on the data from over 25,000 websites with Live Chat support. 

Comm100 discovered that the same percentage of customers were satisfied with their Live Chat experience, compared to just 61% of email users and a worrying 44% of phone users.

9 – Increase average order value

Live Chat can help you increase sales with proactive communication, but it can also help you increase the value of a sale, too!

Many companies have used Live Chat to talk to their customers while they browse for content and products. In that process, you can recommend similar products and services and end up cross-selling and upselling customers, increasing the average order value. Imagine increasing order value with just a simple chat window! 

Let’s say you’re a publisher and a reader is looking to sign up for a basic subscription. A chat agent can send a message through the Live Chat recommending a more sophisticated subscription and maybe offering exclusive content and discounts. 

That’s just an example, but it shows how you can take advantage of Live Chat in upselling and cross-selling strategies. 

10 – Be more competitive in your industry

If you want your company to stand out in its segment, especially if you are in a competitive business, then Live Chat can also help you with that.

Despite being already popular, Live Chat is expected to continue to grow by as much as 87% in the next 12-18 months. In some industries, chat growth has increased by as much as 150% in the last couple of years, according to The Live Chat Benchmark Report.

When we match customers’ expectations to the Live Chat growth perspective, it gets clear it’s no longer an option not to have Live Chat on a website. 

But relax, it’s not like Live Chat is a saturated tool yet. In fact, a Live Chat study made by Super Office with 1,000 websites found that only 9% of them use Live Chat to provide real-time support to their customers.

That means there’s a lot of room to grow with Live Chat. You have the unique opportunity to bring it to your company and become a benchmark in your industry. 

11- Better understanding your customers

Last but not least, Live Chat is a powerful tool to get to know your customers better. What kind of approach works best for them? What are their main pain points with your company and your products? What types of customers need more help or are more prone to become loyal? 

With Live Chat, you can get valuable insights on customers both in quantitative and behavioral terms. A; Zoho study found that 43% of businesses offering Live Chat were able to better understand their customers after just one year of using it.

Start using Live Chat now

Live Chat adoption rates continue to grow across many industries. If you want to be ahead of your competitors, consider implementing Live Chat on your website as soon as possible.

By having Live Chat embedded in your website, you could be:

  • Boosting sales and revenue
  • Offering faster customer support
  • Leveraging customer experience

If your company is not using Live Chat already, now is an excellent time to start!

Arena; has one of the most complete Live Chat solutions on the market, and you can try it for free. 
Click here to access the free trial of our Live Chat and change your business for good!

14 Ways Live Chat a Customer Service Game-Changer

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Live Chat is transforming customer care across many segments. Discover how this tool is leading a “micro revolution” to customer support and sales teams.

What are the main pillars that sustain the relationship between companies and customers? Let’s think for a second about brands that are known for excellent customer experience.

Digital apps, fintech, eCommerce, you name it. No matter the segment, it’s clear that successful brands offer more than great products, advertising, and content. They have a superior approach towards customer service and always try to make sure communication is dynamic and assertive. 

Live Chat is the ultimate tool to offer that. After all, in the age of instant communication, people are not willing to wait much time to have their questions answered. Besides, they increasingly want to count on omnichannel support.

Well, Live Chat is changing Customer Service in many ways. In this post, we’ll explore how this tool is boosting productivity and efficiency in Customer Service and customer satisfaction. 

The context behind Live Chat

For those who are not familiar with Live Chat, here goes a brief description of it.  Live Chat is a tool that allows customers to ask for support via instant messages directly on a company’s website or app while browsing products and viewing content.

Besides, some brands have integrated their Live Chat tools to other messaging platforms to provide a seamless support experience across different brand channels. 

By why exactly is Live Chat disrupting the customer care business? According to Forrester’s study,; 33% of consumers now expect to see Live Chat services offered on every website.

The same report says the number of U.S. online shoppers who use live Chat has increased from 38% to 58% in the last five years. 

Live Chat is mostly used in B2C businesses by support agents and Customer Care teams, but it can also be used by Customer Success and Sales teams in B2B companies.

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Why Live Chat can take Customer Experience to the next level

Live Chat makes communication between brands and their customers much quicker and organic as it emulates conversation platforms. 

Why have the customers reaching for support through email or phone if you can help them in real-time through Live Chat? Here are a few reasons Live Chat is changing customer service in companies. 

1) Enhancing brand experience

It’s no secret customers are more demanding when it comes to customer experience. They have become used to personalized messages and offers in every aspect of their lives, and thus they have high expectations regarding customer service. 

According to Salesforce, 80% of customers believe brand experience is just as important as a brand’s products or services. Another study by Capgemini shows that the same percentage of customers are willing to spend more money to have better customer service. 

Following this logic, customer service can be the central element to differentiate your brand from the competition.

2) Providing fast responses

A few years ago, it might have been OK to make customers wait a couple of days to get responses to their requests via phone or email. That is no longer the truth. 

A study from Hubspot says 90% of customers rate “immediate response” as very important when they have a query. 

Having Live Chat on your website or app gives you the ability to answer queries in real-time. In addition, Live Chat has proven to provide higher customer satisfaction rates than channels such as phone, email, and social media. 

3) Decreasing resolution time 

From a business perspective, Live Chat also has helped companies streamline their customer support processes and optimize customer care strategies. 

With Live Chat, you can route customers to specific departments and agents according to the keywords they use in the chat, for instance, avoiding repeated communication across different support channels. Because it offers instant communication, Live Chat can potentially decrease the average answer and requests resolution time. 

4) Boosting brands Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Agile and effective customer service is the key to drive customer satisfaction. If you want to improve your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), Live Chat is the way to go. Offering real-time, personalized support shows that your company is truly customer-centric;. That is why many companies notice better retention rates after using this type of software.

5) Non-intrusive communication

The best thing about Live Chat is that it happens in an inviting and non-intrusive way. Unlike emails that flood up your mailbox or phone calls from support agents that happen at the worst timing, Live Chat offers an easy way for customers to get done with your requests – in the best timing for them.

It is estimated that 46% of consumers prefer live chat over email and social media, for example. 

Live Chat empowers customers in many ways, allowing multiple interactions on a single web interface. That is vital in today’s digital landscape. According to a study by E-Consultancy, 51% of customers prefer live chat to other channels precisely because it allows them to continue performing other tasks.

6) Using Live Chat Data to improve overall business 

Apart from the; benefits Live Chat brings to daily tasks of customer service, it can serve as a strategic tool to enhance your brand’s marketing, sales, and product strategies.

Because Live Chat provides detailed insights about your website visitors’ journey, it can offer valuable data to help companies grow their bottom lines. 

You can use Live Chat customer insights for:

  • Mapping the customer journey and identifying frequent complaints
  • Personalizing your conversations according to different buyer personas
  • Routing chats to the right department or team
  • Feeding CRM and other data management tools, like Customer Data Platform
  • Improving support agents training according to customers needs and response
  • Improving customer service important KPIs, like first response time and average queue time

7) Understanding where customers come from

One of the challenges for online players is to understand how their Customer Care efforts connect to online conversions. 

Some Live Chat tools allow you to connect the dots between chat sessions and the marketing sources that led the customer to the chat, whether it was a campaign, a disclaimer on the website, or a web search.  Some tools allow you to integrate Live Chat to Google Analytics, for instance, and see a bigger picture of what led customers to chat sessions. 

Such data is important to determine if your marketing channels are actually bringing people to your page and how they are connected to your Live Chat. 

8)  Increasing conversion rates

The study by Forrester shows that consumers who use Live Chat are 2.8x more likely to convert to a sale than those who don’t.  By allowing users to get support without moving to other channels, Live Chat makes buying decisions much quicker and can boost conversion rates.

Placing Live Chat across different touchpoints on a website can also be a good idea. Some companies are using Live Chat in their checkout pages, which helps to solve doubts about payments and shipping, for instance, and thus reduces cart abandonment rates.  

9) Avoiding repetitive tasks for customers and support agents

With a Live Chat customer service tool integrated into your CRM or Data Management Platform (DMP), your team can access customer data or notes from previous interactions to assist customers. That way, you save time that could otherwise be wasted in repetitive conversations. 

Actually, 72% of customers expect customer support agents to know their details like buying history and detailed information — without asking for them.

10) Increasing customers Lifetime Value (LTV) 

Having a sustainable repeat customer base is the dream of every brand, right? Research shows that 63% of consumers who used live chat on a website are likely to return to that site. That is why Live Chat is boosting Customer Life Time Value (LTV) among companies that use it, adding value not just to customer service, but to the whole business. 

11) Cross-selling and upselling products 

Around 33% of the money spent online comes from repeat customers and they generally spend 3 times as much as one time shoppers. Once you build a loyal community of shoppers around your brand, you have the chance to offer proactive communication through Live Chat whenever they access your website. 

Your team can start the conversation, suggesting personalized offers and products through the chat according to the customers buying history and interests, leveraging upselling and cross-selling rates. 

12) Increasing customer engagement

With Live Chat, you are likely to see a significant rise in customer engagement. Because Live Chat emulates messaging apps, it makes interactions with brands more fluid and organic. 

Besides, you can add layers of engagement to Live Chat by adopting a few features in it, such as:

  • Co-browsing: Co-browsing, in the context of Live Chat, is when a customer and a support agent browse a page together during a chat session. It delivers a guided experience and it’s a great way to guide customers through form fill-ups and complex applications, for instance. 
  • Vídeo and Voice Chat: Customers sometimes have requests that are complex or take too long to explain by text. With that in mind, some companies are adding Vídeo and Voice Chat to their Live Chat experience. Not only can it help solve queries quicker, but it also makes interactions more dynamic and personal. 

13) Increasing productivity in Customer Care

At last, another triumph of Live Chat is to leverage Customer Care productivity. It reduces the queue time and enables faster resolution of issues, but beyond that, it allows agents to handle multiple chats at the same time. 

As a result, Live Chat can boost important productivity KPIs such as first response time (FRT), average queue time, number of chats answered, and so on. 

14) Human touch

In the era of hyper-automation and chatbots;, a human approach to customer experience might give you extra points in the relationship with customers. Even though automated emails and chatbots; can benefit customer support, users have shown that they want to interact with humans whenever possible.

The 2019 CGS Customer Service Chatbots & Channels Survey found out that 86% of American customers prefer to talk to humans over chatbots. With Live Chat, you can give customers personalized, warm assistance in an easy, user-friendly way. Besides, much like at physical stores, consumers are more likely to buy when they are treated well.

Conclusion

As we have seen, Live Chat has the potential to change Customer Care across many different industries, and your company shouldn’t be left behind. 

Live Chat can optimize many aspects of a digital business, and executives are increasingly aware of its importance. A 2018 survey from Bold 360 found out that 71% of respondents believe Live Chat will surpass traditional customer service communication channels by 2021.

If your organization has not yet incorporated Live Chat into customer service, it’s time to change that.

Arena; has one of the most complete Live Chat solutions on the market, and the best thing is that you can try it for free. 
Click here to access the free trial of our Live Chat and start answering your customers quickly right now!

Live Chat Marketing: Improve Customer Experience

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Live Chat has been around for some time now. But why is it everyone talking about it all of a sudden? For starters, more than customer support, it can also be used for marketing and sales.

Despite not being a new tool, it is being used in different and more efficient ways now. Even when it was already used for customer support, it was not really the best of channels since it promised real-time answers, and that didn’t really happen.

However, with the digital presence’s growth, many customer-related services and marketing strategies needed to evolve. Before, companies were more centered on presenting and selling their products.

What’s different today? Strategies are customer-centric! That means that most content is focused on the customer’s journey. Instead of just showing them the product, marketing needs to work around the pain points and how to deal with them.

And what does Live Chat have to do with this? Since it’s a communication channel, it’s a path that will give the customers what they are looking for: a quick and efficient service. Plus, it’s a benefit for the company.

Through Live Chat, you can get to know who your consumer is, what they are looking for, and store important information that will lead to the brand’s following marketing plans.

Why is now the best time to invest in a Live Chat solution? Let’s learn a bit more about it!

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Why does marketing need Live Chat?

One characteristic of the Live Chat is the capability of personalizing the initial message. Every system gives you the possibility to do that. Even more than one message can be included to be sent according to the customer and navigation made.

So, if someone visited a product page, you can send them a message offering a discount. But if it’s the person’s first time on your page, you can simply say, “welcome! What can I do for you?”.

This feature is excellent because it allows you to work according to the current strategy and moment the brand lives. Additionally, you don’t need to use the same messages for the rest of the company’s existence. The decision is not that dramatic. It can and should be updated as your brand grows.

Many companies have difficulties using Live Chat, they have and use the tool, but they know they could be doing more and better with it. If that’s the case for you, I’m glad you are here to find some ideas to improve your tactic. 

What are Live Chat features?

You can talk to customers, sell products, and work your marketing plans through the chat. Overall, all of these features will follow your chat’s first message. That’s the link we make here that explains why I’ve talked about it in more detail earlier.

That happens because that’s where you catch the client’s attention to start a conversation. From then on, it’s on the attendant’s hands. The conversations need to be helpful and flow naturally, always thinking about the customer’s needs first.

Does Live Chat have anything to do with Customer Experience?

To sum up: it has EVERYTHING to do with it.

Every bit of interaction someone has with your company is already a part of their experience, so it wouldn’t be different with Live Chat. Though it does have something more: it’s a tool that allows you to communicate directly with the consumer.

It’s a means to help them and make their entire experience easier and better. If you’re having trouble with customer services, Live Chat can help you transform your image for the better as long as you follow some best practices, of course.

More than installing this tool, you need actually to have a strategy to work with it. To help you understand what kind of approach is the best for your brand, here is some more information on the benefits of this tool: 

What are some Live Chat benefits for your company?

A happy customer

When you put the client at the center of your strategy, things tend to get better magically. And Live Chat is one of the tools that help that magic happen. It gives the consumer convenience of having their questions answered without the need to make a call, send an email, or even leave the page.

More than that, customers can:

  • be attended while multitasking;
  • have real-time and efficient answers;
  • get their questions answered before, during, and after the purchase;
  • have a closer relationship with the brand.

Higher satisfaction levels

Because of the reasons mentioned above, you could only get this consequence: a higher customer satisfaction level. It’s considerably better than other support channels, like through email or phone.

Besides, with the real-time factor in action, customers get a more positive and complete experience. Thus, increasing the chances, they will recommend your brand to friends and family.

Sales strategies

By using Live Chat, it’s possible to create automatic messages and practice complementary sales strategies. So, through this, you can rescue abandoned carts, offer discounts on products that were visited but not added to the cart, and use the cross-selling strategy.

All of these alternatives are made with the first message coming from the brand itself.

How does that work? For instance, if you have an abandoned cart, there’s a reason for it, right? So, what was it? Maybe shipping costs were too high. Perhaps they tried using a coupon that expired, or something like that. 

To know exactly what message will affect the customer, you need to track what actions were taken by the consumer on your page. On this note, you should also know that working with Customer Data is essential.

If the expired coupon was the reason for an abandoned cart, what can you do? One option would be sending a personalized message offering a new coupon.

Customer’s journey

Because it provides service for any customer, it works the entire life cycle, being a complete tool. In other words, it works the customer journey. If they’re in the discovery phase, the chat can work to lead them to purchase faster. But if they are already considering a solution, the chat can be used to convince them your product is better — or at least to give them an extra push with a discount.

Even if a decision isn’t made right away, you can still generate qualified leads through the use of Live Chat. For example, if someone comes asking details about a product, you can say you’ll send all the information through email.

There are many ways to work the customer journey here and it’s better that you talk with the marketing team so you can line up the best strategy for your brand.

Faster decision making

Because Live Chat can influence the customer journey, it can also be used to help consumers make faster decisions. That is one reason why your conversion rate increases by up to 42% by using this chat system.

Everything should be done in a way that doesn’t pressure the client, of course. However, this method to lead them to purchases in a quicker way is quite efficient.

Basically, when someone asks for shipping costs of a certain product, you can offer some special advantage — for example, free shipping to buy that product + some complimentary item like, let’s say, a smartphone and a personalized case.

Instead of spending weeks thinking and analyzing if they actually do want to buy that item, the client will take advantage and purchase at that very moment, hence making a shorter customer journey than it’d be without the help of a Live Chat.

Offline configuration

Despite many companies already knowing the impotence of using Live Chat, they recognize they are not using it at its full potential. More than that, they end up disabling the chat during some periods when there are no attendants available.

Why shouldn’t you do this? I mean, yes, you can make a form available where clients will share their email and share what is their question, but when will they be answered? The real-time chat is what really gets them satisfied, so this might not be the best choice.

So, how will you deal with this problem? One alternative is the use of chatbots when there are no human agents to chat. They are not as efficient as humans, but they keep the instant messages going and, if you choose an AI bot, most problems will be solved.

A lot of Live Chat tools have the chatbot available within their system. Make sure to check that information when choosing the tool for your eCommerce.

Longer relationships with customers

Have you ever had issues when purchasing online? Who did you go to? Was there someone you could talk to? If there’s no one available, the chances you lose purchase and a customer are high.

That means, when offering a Live Chat solution, you’re giving yourself a treat: a better relationship with your consumers that will have a great purchasing experience. Therefore, maintaining a relationship with the brand.

Cost reduction

First of all, acquiring a Live Chat system is not as expensive as other software might be. Moreover, it pays itself really fast. What does that mean? It has an excellent ROI.

Besides, when you used to invest in 6 telemarketing agents, now you can invest in just one attendant for the Live Chat. According to research, an attendant can talk up to 6 people at once while keeping a quality service.

Do you see now how Live Chat is perfect for helping your business’ marketing? 

Do you want to use Live Chat for your brand’s marketing?

Then you’re in the right place!

The job of a marketing team is, essentially, listening to the customer. The more you know your audience, the better you will work with Live Chat. Here, I should also add that having a trustable database is crucial to understanding consumers’ needs.

Also, real-time tracking of the customer’s actions on your page will help act at the right time and guarantee a higher conversion rate.

Best practices for a more efficient Live Chat

An important action to succeed with the use of Live Chat is to make your CTA the most attractive. Thus, the initial message needs to be a trigger to the consumer.

Moreover, you can and should program different initial messages according to each consumer and the phase of the journey they’re in. After all, people visiting the website for the first time need a different incentive than the ones who have already purchased previously and are coming back.

One of the most critical factors is: train your attendant team!

But first, who will have access to the chat? Will it be the support team? Or the marketing team? Whoever is responsible for talking directly with the customers needs to have both the capacity to support and sell. When this information is defined, you’ll know exactly what type of training will be necessary.

What else needs to be done? You should definitely create a protocol and some answer models. However, make it clear for the attendants to personalize the messages, not only copy and paste. They should never sound like a robot!

Does your company have a tone of voice defined? If so, the chat should stick to it. If not, you should immediately work on it. Keep it professional and helpful, adapting to your public’s language. For example, if it’s a younger audience, use slangs and emojis or keep it a bit more formal if it’s an older public.

Instruction to not pressure the client should be clear as well. Nobody likes to do anything under pressure, and, if that does happen, chances are you will never see that person again. Knowing who the best leads are is an ability to be trained too.

Usually, when consumers ask about payment means or ask for more information on a product is an indication of a qualified lead. 

Lastly, it’s not only about answering right away. Just as important is actually resolving the customer’s problems. Most people won’t mind if you take one minute longer to answer them if they get the information they want.

So, if you create this combo of velocity and efficiency, there are no brands that will beat your customer experience! 

Why should you choose Arena?

We have over 6,000 clients worldwide that will tell you just how much Arena has helped them improve their customer experience and grow in the market with Live Blog, Live Chat and more.

Besides, you can try our platform for free! It’s all about advantages right from the start.

Start testing our tool today and try all of these Live Chat marketing strategies we’ve talked about!