It is well known to everyone that quality service is very crucial to the success of any business. A good user experience and service from the business end makes the customer a loyal customer, who tends to come back again and again to the same business.

What does a worthwhile and memorable user experience look like? Well, Let’s start with a Live chat. Live chat is more than just a nice add-on to a website, it has proved its importance in providing answers to a business’s clients in real time. However, live chat has proved its importance far beyond its original intended use.

Live chat software like Zendesk, Live chat, and Olark make it very easy for webmasters to integrate a human powered Live chat system to their website in no time.

Here are the five reasons why a live chat program is beneficial for a website:

For the record

You can have a record of complaints or issues communicated by customers. Content can then be developed for questions asked consistently by many users. This is not the case with telephone calls. Even in instances where the audio can be recorded, it will be more expensive to store than text data.

More importantly, the textual nature of live chats allows for easier and more thorough analysis of information collected through this channel. Customers’ questions and problems can, therefore, be resolved more comprehensively. This leads to greater satisfaction and potentially higher sales.

Efficiency

This is a major factor as to why live chat is slowly taking over from call centers in many companies today. A customer care agent on phone can only deal with one customer at a time but a live chat agent has the ability to deal with several clients.

There is another way in which live chat allows care agents to handle more volumes than on phone. Recurring complaints can easily be resolved by redirecting customers to a set of written FAQs. This will enable agents to resolve much more issues than if they were detained on phone addressing the same problem.

As the analysis is done on the queries, patterns can be identified and issues added to the website content as FAQs. This means more queries can be resolved without having to engage customer service agents.

Lower costs

Speaking of efficiency, live chat has proven much more cost effective than traditional phone-based support. Telephone communication can be very expensive as compared to the cost of data consumed by live text.

Availability

How many times have you tried to call the customer care line of a given service provider and not been able to go through? This can be particularly frustrating if the telephone was your only option to get any assistance. Live chat on the website increases the channels through which your customers can get help, hence increasing your availability to them.

This will give your clients that their grievances are important to you. In turn, your clients will view you more as a caring, trustworthy vendor.

Higher sales

When integrating live chat into their websites, most businesses originally meant it strictly as a customer support tool. However, the support can be extended to support while making purchases to ensure buyers complete purchase journeys while transacting online.

If you notice that online buyers are dropping off at a particular point in the purchase process, you can introduce a prominent live support chat link there. You can also introduce a live chat targeted at online buyers in general offering clear instructions on how to complete a purchase.

Live chat has impacted the sales figures for a number of e-commerce businesses positively in this way. A recent study shows that close to 50% of Internet-using buyers think having real-time help while making a purchase is an important website feature.