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Are you effectively serving your customers through live chat? The answer to this question can mean the difference between a lucrative program that maximizes revenue lift and your customer’s experience with your brand, and one that accomplishes the exact opposite.
Here are five ways to optimize your live chat program and ensure the best possible results.
- Meet With Your Sales Agents Regularly
Live chat is more than a technology. It is a sales and customer service tool that requires the same level of upkeep and attention as other critical aspects of your business. Sit down regularly with the people on the front lines of your live chat program to gain valuable insight into what’s working, what’s not, and where the failure points typically occur.
- Quantify Your Qualitative Data
Live chat gives you the incredible opportunity to gather valuable customer feedback in real-time, but without a way to capture and quantify this qualitative information, it will be difficult to put the data to good use. To get the most out of live chat and improve the customer experience, you must leverage dynamic data to turn insight into action.
- Perfect Your Timing
On average, customers are waiting 2 minutes and 40 seconds to initiate live chat. Because every business is unique, there is no one size fits all approach to optimizing the live chat experience. In fact, certain strategies can decrease conversions, especially those that distract web visitors from an already highly converting and functional CTA. However, smart forecasting can help you align chat volumes to staffing plans to cut down wait times while increasing profits. It’s important to know what times of day or days of the week will generate the most lift..
- Choose Your Words Wisely
Live chat is an effective sales tool because it allows your business to connect personally with web visitors. But if you take the personal out of personalized, your live chat feature may do more harm than good. If you want to provide an excellent live chat experience, you must treat your customers like humans. Soft skills like empathy, active listening, problem solving, and written communication all contribute to the live chat experience. Arming your agents with deep customer insights can help them prepare to offer more personalized communication.
- Be More Selective
Certain visitors on your website are more likely to lead to revenue lift than others. For that reason, it’s critical that you have the ability to identify and offer chat to those visitors, and avoid visitors who are looking for support or other low sales value engagements. By targeting the right visitors you will increase agent productivity and the overall profitability of your chat program.
