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How Live Chat Helps Online Business to Increase Sales

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Owing to digital transformation how businesses communicate with customers has evolved and is now mostly via collaboration tools and chat apps. There is an upside to using chat apps – your business can provide far better customer support.

Live chat is now a prerequisite for websites that sell stuff via their online store. Live chat can reduce cart abandonment and therefore increase sales.

A study done by emarketer.com found that 63% were more likely to return to a live chat website, and 62% reported being more likely to purchase from the site again.

A further 38% of respondents said they had made their purchase due to the chat session.

Owing to its multiple features live chat can be helpful to increase the sales in various ways including

  • improving conversion rate
  • instant customer service
  • customer retention

Loyalty

How does live chat improve customer loyalty and retention?

Live chat is very convenient for the customers as it enables the companies to address the customers’ queries in real-time.

One of the reasons customers abandon shopping is because of confusion and complications created at the time of check out.

Live chat provides instant help with product queries and helps in addressing the concerns of the customers, thereby increasing the sales and conversion rates.

With features like co-browsing, many Live Chat apps allow the agents to browse along with the customers while chatting and help customers resolve their queries.

According to HelpScout, live chat has 85% customer satisfaction rate – the highest of all customer service channels.

Hence, it can be inferred that enabling live chat can increase customer loyalty and retention, thereby increasing revenue.

Some of the industries that are not traditionally online businesses that have seen an uptick in customer satisfaction from using Live Chat include:

  • Transport
  • Health care
  • Manufacturing
  • Government
  • Banking and Finance
  • Telecoms

Conversion rate

Evidence suggests increases in the conversion rate and order value. Customers that are reassured they have support from the business will complete their purchase and often buy items they hadn’t intended to get.

Live chat helps to address the customers’ queries in real-time and is quicker compared to phone or email. This reduces the waiting time for customers, and they can continue with online shopping.

Moreover, live chat is enabled with features like screen sharing, which allows the agent to share the screen with the customer. It helps provide a more efficient resolution to the customer.

As per the poll done by Anderson Consulting, almost 62% of internet customers stated that they would purchase more products online if live customer support was available. Moreover, it also reduced shopping cart abandonment by up to 30%.

Competitive advantage

Anything that will give your business a competitive advantage should be seriously considered. Live Chat is no longer the competitive advantage when it was first released. However, there will be competitors in your market that is yet to include the system, so you’ll be ahead of them when you do.

Using video chat allows the customer to have face-to-face interaction with the agent, which helps build trust and confidence.

According to a study, customers who use your live chat platform are three times more likely to buy since the method provides direct and personal interaction with customers.

Moreover, enabling live chat will help you cut down the operating costs as it is cheaper than other tools like phones.

Summary

There are many advantages to using live chat. Make sure you do your homework, as not all live chat apps are the same.

Today you can get intelligent live chat solutions that include AI. While initially, users were hesitant to use live chat – now it’s a go-to for any product or service question. There’s no denying its usefulness in growing sales through less cart abandonment.

Hence, it can be stated that live chat is the key to thriving and flourishing in the cluttered competitive market.

Plus you don’t have to pay a lot for the service – if you have a WordPress site you can add a Live Chat plugin.

There are many other ways to grow your sales too including leveraging customers’ smartphones and using marketing strategies like podcasts and transactional emails.

HubSpot