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Increasing sales and delivering a better customer experience with live chat
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Contents Executive summary
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The stats around live chat
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Why consumers love live chat
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Don't ignore your customers
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Improving efficiency and cutting costs
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Transforming customer service
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Generating revenue with live chat
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Use case – online retailer
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Use Case – luxury car dealer
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Live chat vendors – key considerations
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Executive summary Contact forms, generic info @ email addresses, FAQ pages; all of them can leave customers feeling ignored – ignored by a lack of instant response and ignored by your business not taking into consideration their needs and expectations. None of these options offer personalised interactions, and, more often than not, they are a clunky inefficient experience for even a desktop user, let alone a mobile visitor. And what is it your customers are trying to contact you about anyway? A simple query, the same kind a consumer in a shop would have for sales agent, maybe about a setting, a size or a service, should be a small speed bump, the lowest of low barriers to sale. Instead, your website turns it into an impossibly tall obstacle that the customer is unable or unwilling to navigate around if you are not enabling them with a way to obtain an answer quickly, and simply. It may even be that they are trying to let you know about a website glitch preventing them from completing their purchase, a glitch that is costing you more sales each passing second – but their comment into the website contact form either sits idly in an agent's inbox without a way of knowing how urgent it is, or is never even written, as the customer simply heads to your competitor’s site instead. Or perhaps the customer would benefit from a product or service they don’t even know about. Without 2-way communication between the customer and agent, the consumer will be underserved, and your business, underselling. There is of course a way to resolve all of these problems, and that is by implementing a live chat solution. Today, live chat is an essential part of your web presence, as much as having an email address or an internet connection. It gives users the convenience of talking to your company in a way that suits them, and has been proven to both improve conversion rates on a site and even increase the average transaction value (ATV). What’s more, live chat can be a solution you can immediately see the pay out from, within hours of offering it to your customers. As with any business decision, there are a few key points to consider before investing. This eBook will talk you through these key considerations, from making sure your solution is future proofed for tomorrow, to protecting your customers' data today, as well as highlighting the three main business benefits of implementing a live chat solution: improving your customers' experience, cutting costs, and generating revenue. 3
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The stats around Live Chat 53% of customers would prefer to use online chat before calling a company for support. Harris Research
Chat has become the leading contact source within the online environment, with 42% of customers using chat versus email (23%) J.D Power
Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, 92% customers feel satisďŹ ed when they use the live chat feature Zendesk
Of those who prefer live chat, 79% said they did so because they get their questions answered quickly, 51% did so because they could multi-task. 21% prefer it so they can shop while they work Econsultancy
44% of customers consider a conversation with a representative in real time the most important feature of an online shop’s website Forrester
74% of customers are frustrated when content or communications are not personalised to them Loyalty 360
Personalisation will enable digital businesses to increase proďŹ ts by 15% by 2020 Gartner
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Why consumers love live chat Consumers love live chat. It’s quick for them to use, allowing them access to answers within seconds – the closest thing to a brick and mortar experience. There’s no worries over consumer adoption, as, for most chat widgets, it’s as familiar to customers as texting or instant messaging a friend or family member, lowering the bar to entry for customer service. Consumers understand it’s private and that their queries are not going to be posted publicly as comments anywhere and have faith that any sensitive data they share in the channel will be protected. Most of all, it’s convenient. Live chat offers a winning combination of low social pressure on the consumer end with the expectation of quick answers and resolutions. Customers have the ultimate freedom to answer in their own time, whether they are cooking or eating dinner, trying to get the kids ready for bed or commuting on the train between blips of lost connection. But alongside this, they also feel confident they will get a reply quickly – that they are talking to an actual agent (perhaps even when they are talking to a bot). They are, at the very least, more assured using this channel than sending an email or using a contact form, where their queries and data are sent and immediately become untethered from their control, disappearing into the ether of the web with no confirmation or confidence that there will be a response.
As many as 77% of customers won’t make a purchase on a website if there’s no live chat option available FurstPerson Live chat isn’t just a favourite channel that customers are pleasantly surprised to find on a website any more either. Customers expect it, so much so, they are reluctant to make a purchase if there is no live chat option available, without that agent to just ease a niggling worry that they have or convert an easy objection. With the expectation therefore so prevalent, to not offer live chat on your site is not just to ignore the messages you would no doubt have coming in, it is also flagrantly ignoring key wants and needs of your customers and prospects. And yet, this is exactly what so many companies are doing. 5
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Don't ignore your customers Despite this clear signal from consumers, adoption from businesses of live chat remains low. Companies are either shunning the channel altogether like an ostrich with their head in the sand, or they are implementing a chat solution without proper management leading to ignored customers. Remember, consumers like live chat because it is live. The same way you wouldn’t expect a store assistant to stand and blink at you for half an hour before replying to your query, customers equally expect a speedy response to their chats, viewing them as small vendor windows to your virtual store. This helps to explains why conversion rates of live chat conversations simply drop off a cliff face if agents take longer
55% of customers will abandon transaction if they can’t find an answer to a question
than five minutes to reply without any kind of
Forrester
placeholder message. Businesses often let these stats put them off live chat altogether, believing it will cost them more in staffing costs to manage the channel. This is a fatal mistake. Not only will live chat make customer service agents more efficient, enabling you to cut staff costs, it’s also important to consider how much revenue you are losing out on with each passing second without live chat. The era of information has made customers fickle and given them great power to take their business elsewhere. Customers are abandoning your site with a single click and without a second thought, flocking instead to your competitors after they are unable to find either answers to their queries on your site, or a way to retrieve them. Besides, just because the majority of companies are failing to live up to customer expectation on this channel, that doesn’t mean that it’s hard to do well. In actual fact, the right vendor won’t just make it easy for you to integrate live chat to your communication channels, it will also make it easy for you to manage. But this ability to easily adopt and manage the channel also means that it won’t be long before the majority of companies catch up with the reality of this demand. Adopting live chat today with the right vendor will put you at a unique advantage for the time being, but it will also be an essential requirement in order to avoid you being left behind by competitors in the very near future.
Live chat is expected to grow 87% in 2018, and then at an exponential increase each year Customer Think 6
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Improving efficiency and cutting costs A 2015 study conducted by the Aberdeen Group, which compared businesses with live chat compared to those without, revealed the following benefits:
34%
greater annual improvement in customer satisfaction rate.
2.4X 20%
greater annual improvement in customer contact abandonment rate.
9.3X 2.6X
greater annual increase in cross-sell and up-sell revenue.
greater annual improvement in agent utilization rate.
greater annual improvement in customer care costs.
You spend huge amounts on SEO and PPC to order to get traffic to your site, but how much of that actually results in conversion? With so many customers abandoning sites that do not have live chat, having live chat is proven to increase conversion rates of website traffic. This doesn’t, however, just equate to increased revenue. It also makes the spend of your marketing campaigns incredibly more efficient, lowering the cost per transaction. This results in more money in the marketing purse that can either be reinvested in campaigns, banked as increased profit margin or put to use elsewhere. 7
Live chat can result in a 40% increase in conversion rate Forrester
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Transforming customer service No matter how good a hire or how talented they are, your agents, humans that they are, can only hold one ticket at a time if they are offering sales or customer support on the phone. But with the right live chat solution, they are able to easily juggle multiple tickets at a time, increasing the efficiency of your customer service and sales floors instantly. Live chat also results in lower than average handling time for inbound queries, providing not just a more cost-efficient way to resolve customer enquiries but also improve the experience for your customers with quicker resolutions for them and their own busy lives.
Agents can respond to as many as six customer tickets at once with live chat Telus International Increasing the efficiency of your sale and customer service floors also equates to your business needing less additional resource such as the number of support staff you require. The savings in salaries and benefits, especially as your business grows cannot be underestimated in your ability to thrive in your industry, as it will also provide the company with more budget to reinvest in other areas and have increased competitive edge. Live chat doesn’t just allow your customers to ask questions about your product or service, it also allows them to give feedback about any issues you may be unaware of. There could be a fatal flaw in your product or service offering that you have no way to knowing about without this window into your customers' insights. There could be a method of payment that is commonly used and not accepted on your site. There could be a payment portal that is failing, a voucher code from a campaign that is not working or a vital product view that is not displaying correctly. Having live chat enables your customers to instantly report any problems they are having, and also gives your agents a chance to offer either immediate resolution, or an ETA on the fix whilst recording the customer’s preferred contact method to let them know when everything has been solved. This streamlined resolution process could save incredible amounts when you consider that these issues would otherwise possibly go unnoticed, making it extremely difficult or even impossible for customers to make a purchase.  8
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Generating revenue with live chat Having live chat integrated to your site instantly starts to generate more revenue from the minute it’s switched on. First and foremost, live chat removes barriers to sale and will therefore generate more sales. You may not even know what your customers' main objections are to buying your product or service – your agents may be able to manoeuvre customers around them with ease, converting with a single fact or phrase, but you’ll never know unless you get your customers to reach out and ask. Allowing customers to have a conversation with you increases the transparency of their purchases. It raises their knowledge and understanding of products of services by giving them access to as many answers as they require for your business to make a sale.
44% of consumers said that having a live person answer their questions while they were in the middle of an online purchase was one of the most important features a website could offer. Customers who use live chat are also worth more with a 10% increase in cart value after using the channel. Forrester
For big ticket items especially, such as holidays, cars or financing, consumers like to be in control of their research and may have reams of questions they need answered before moving onto the next buying stage. By empowering them to pull this knowledge out from your agents, you are instantly moving them down the buying line, increasing the likelihood of a sale. What’s more, having the ability to reach out and speak to an agent (or have an agent reach out with proactive web chat) puts a sales agent in the living room of every one of your customers who can not only engage and inform, but also, upsell, which explains why even ATV becomes higher for companies when they adopt live chat.
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Use case – online retailer An online clothing retailer sees 5000 unique visitors to their website per month with a 5% conversion of sales. Employing the right live chat solution for them increases their conversion to 6%. It also increases the average transaction value (ATV) from £100 to £110 as agents are able to upsell products or quicker delivery services.
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Before live chat solution
After live chat solution
5% of 5000 = 250 visitors converted
6% of 5000 = 300 visitors converted
250 x ATV of £100 = £25,000
300 x ATV of £110 = £33,000
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Use case – luxury car dealer A luxury vehicle website also sees 5000 unique visitors to their website per month, but as a big ticket item, sees a lower conversion rates of 0.1% Employing the right live chat solution for them increases their conversion to 0.12%. It also increases the ATV from £30,000 to £33,000 as agents are able to upsell the car model and optional features.
Before live chat solution
After live chat solution
0.1% of 5000 = 5 visitors converted
0.12% of 5000 = 6 visitors converted
5 x ATV of £30,000 = £150,000
6 x ATV of £33,000 = £198,000
In both cases, live chat has immediately equated to nearly a third increase in return before factoring in other savings from increased efficiency on the agent floor. We’ve also been very conservative with live chat’s ability to improve conversion rates. A recent study from Forrester showed live chat increases site conversion up to 40%. The spend in search engine marketing and advertising to generate website traffic remains the same in both scenarios, but the profit return increases dramatically with improved conversion rates from implementing live chat. In both of scenarios the businesses will generate greater return without increasing marketing investment, deliver a better level of customer service and greater efficiency with a sales and service team that can handle multiple enquires simultaneously.
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Live chat vendors – key considerations As we’ve alluded to throughout this eBook, not all live chat solutions are created equal, and some can cause more headaches than they do cures. Your business needs a live chat solution that alleviates your pain points, and also creates unexpected benefits that will delight everyone - from your customers and staff, to your shareholders and boss. But what do you need to consider and look out for when choosing a live chat vendor? Here’s a definitive list: Excellent SaaS tool or integration capabilities When looking for a live chat provider, you should first look at the kind of SaaS INTEGRATION
tool that they offer for your agents to manage the conversations they have coming in. Does it make it easy for agents to identify customers? Does it give you the ability to have multiple teams (such as sales and customer service, or different regional offices) and transfer chats between these? Are there
different permissions and abilities for supervisors? Does it offer built-in reporting that gives you a unique advantage when identifying ways to make the agent floor more efficient? If you already have a SaaS tool, how easy does the vendor make it to plug their live chat APIs and reporting Fitting into the omnichannel landscape Customers today are omnichannel. They use multiple channels to OMNICHANNEL
communicate with your business and expect the context of their conversations to carry from one channel to another without seams or friction. Not only does this mean it’s more important than ever to offer customers the channel of their choice (making it vital to have live chat in
your arsenal), but you should also make sure that your live chat supplements this omnichannel expectation and does not run in a distinct silo from the rest of your customer communications. Data compliance Live chat conversations are subject to the same data compliance rules COMPLIANT
as any other channel such as email. Your vendor should understand this and be able to answer any questions you have on this, such as where the conversation data is stored, or if there are systems in place to support the customer’s right to be forgotten. If you are opting for the provider’s SaaS
tool, do they offer any tools to support your agents and company to remain GDPR compliant? Remember, you require a vendor that will make your life easier, not create any problems.
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Live chat vendors – key considerations Stay in keeping with your brand You’ve worked hard to create a recognisable brand for your company. BRAND
Does the chat widget that the vendor is offering have capability to be personalised to fit your brand?
Future-proofed capability Whether or not you are thinking about using bots right now for your live FUTURE PROOF
chat solution, with Gartner predicting that more of us will communicate with bots in 2020 day-to-day than our spouses, and the AI which powers bots becoming not only increasingly more sophisticated but also increasingly accessible for every day businesses, you should choose a live chat vendor that will be able to easily integrate bot capabilities as soon as you are ready to adopt them.
Speed of integration and level of support Finally, you should consider how quickly your vendor will be able to get SUPPORT
your solution implemented, and how accessible and reliable their support is should you have any issues either with the integration or further down the line. If you come to depend on your live chat solution, could your business cope if the service went down with no timeline of when it would be back up and running?
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