Live chat has been causing a buzz in the business communications sphere for a few years now. In multiple surveys, it has stood out as a top preference for customers to reach out to a business.
But what exactly are the benefits of real-time chat – for both customers and businesses? Here’s the run down.
Increased Customer Engagement
To begin with, live chat can help you boost customer engagement, especially if you integrate this communication option into your business app via chat API.
Live chat has a very low threshold for customers to engage with your business. If they have any questions about your products or services, all they need to do to get answers is to hit the live chat icon in the corner.
Building Trust, Boosting Conversions
Another advantage of live chat is that it makes communication much more immediate and human, allowing your agents to build rapport with customers.
Instead of waiting days for a stilted response from a business via mail, customers can interact at eye level with against via instant messaging.
Most people use real-time messaging through apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in their daily lives. Consequently, it’s easy for them to establish a rhythm of conversation – and even banter – with your business’ representatives.
Overall, this helps you establish trust and so increase conversions.
Better Customer Support Experiences
In addition to increasing initial conversions, live chat can also help you boost your customer satisfaction when it comes to support.
That is principally thanks to faster response times and a lack of repetitions.
In terms of response times, customers have high expectations. According to data by HubSpot, almost two thirds of potential buyers expect businesses to respond to queries within a mere ten minutes. Live chat can help you achieve this. Agents will be instantly available to answer questions and resolve issues.
Furthermore, real-time chat is automatically transcribed in one place, unlike phone conversations or email exchanges spread out over time. Conversations can thus easily be stored for future reference.
A customer who contacts you to follow up on a problem they were experiencing won’t have to explain everything all over again. Instead, your agent can simply glance over past chat interactions and pick up where their colleague left off.
In-Depth Analytics
Finally, one major advantage of live chat for businesses is that it offers tons of data for in-depth analytics.
You can use AI-driven software and machine learning algorithms to identify customer behaviour dynamics and assess your agents’ performance.
Ultimately, this data can help you respond to queries more efficiently and provide agents with the support needed to maximize their productivity.
Conclusion: Harness Chat and Other Real-Time Channels
As we have seen, integrating live chat into your business apps via chat APIs brings a number of benefits.
In addition, though, many chat API providers also offer additional channels for real-time communication. QuickBlox, for instance, also comes with video chat and group video conferencing solutions, tailored to industries from ecommerce over education to healthcare.
