Reasons Your Business Needs Live Chat on Its Website

The faster a business responds to its customers, the more leads they can get. Businesses that don't respond to their clients'/customers' inquiries fast enough lose leads. According to a survey done by Drift.com, businesses are 10 times less likely to even be able to get back in contact with a lead after the first 5 minutes. Even waiting just 10 minutes to respond to clients results in a 400% decrease in the likelihood of qualifying a lead. The best and fastest way to respond to your customer base is through live chat.

Clients/Customers and prospects can speak with an actual human being. People enjoy speaking with a real person via chat compared to other communication channels. In fact, they prefer the live chat. According to the previously mentioned Zendesk study, businesses receiving customer service/support tickets through their websites receive fewer request submissions through their site forms after adding live chat. But why do people prefer live chat? Well, according to a survey conducted by BoldChat, 21% of customers/clients believe they get better information through live chat than they would via email, and 15% of customers/clients believe live chat gives them better information than if they called. 46% feel that live chat is easily the best communication method. This likely has a lot to do with response time, where issues can be addressed immediately.

Address objections immediately. Sometimes, customers might be ready to purchase and simply don't for whatever reason. But usually, that reason is that they have a question that isn't answered within the FAQs, so they search for the answer off-site. With live chat, customers can ask those questions directly instead of seeking information elsewhere. You can also pre-emptively address those customers non-FAQ questions and issues so that they never need to go searching for the answer in the first place.

Customers/Clients are able to multitask. According to the same BoldChat survey (mentioned earlier), 51% of customers/clients enjoy live chat because they can conduct other tasks at the same time, and 21% of customers/clients like live chat because they can chat while they're also at work.

Assist people even when no one is available to help. Wondering how you can address people in chat when you don't have someone available to speak to them? You can use chat bots to set up customized automated responses for certain questions. Depending on the software and how you set up the responses, you can potentially make it so that it's difficult to tell whether it's a live person responding or an automated bot. (That said, remember the first benefit mentioned. Customers/clients like speaking with a live person, and you won't be able to set up an automated answer for every question or issue. Reserve usage of bots and automated responses only for when you don't have a human being physically available to answer questions or address issues.)

Address Customer Concerns Pre-Purchase or Mid-Purchase. According to a Forrester report, about 50% of consumers state that live chat with an actual person answering product or service question mid-purchase is one of the most crucial features a business can offer.

Get Live Chat for Free or Purchase Inexpensively. Adding a live chat function to your site doesn't have to break the bank. There are free live chat options such as Facebook Messenger (you just need to have a Facebook page for your business), and the least inexpensive live chat options start at as little as $17 per month (billed annually) for three chat agents/operators. Take advantage of free trials and research all your options so you can decide what will work best for your business for the time being. You can always update a plan or switch to a better live chat function when necessary.

There are plenty of other live chat benefits not listed here. However, the above reasons should be plenty to help you see how valuable live chat is for your customers, and ultimately the future of your business.