Your business needs live chat. Here’s why.

Every year, there is a new big thing that suddenly businesses can’t live without, and like fishes out of water, without it, they will become irrelevant and die. Sounds a tad dramatic but unfortunately, customers and technology both dictate whether a company is relevant or not, directly or indirectly. Consumers can make or break a company with a single tweet, and technology can make waves so large, only the strong, tech-savvy businesses survive. Irrelevance is the deepest fear of all types of business, whether they are retail, commercial or industrial, as relevance is essential to survival, let alone thriving.

Remaining relevant online has become a key indicator of a business’ health in the UK. If a business does not have a website, they are not relevant and don’t exist in a customer’s mind. Likewise, if they don’t have an active social media page, they also don’t exist to a large segment of customers, particularly in retail, so therefore, they are essentially invisible. If a company does not rank high enough on Google, they aren’t relevant. And if they lack the fortitude to keep up with technology trends technology, they disappear altogether.

Similarly, if a business has not evolved to match their customer’s baseline communication preferences, it will wither and die. Imagine if a business asked its customers to fax in documents rather than email them, operating like they would in 1970. Do you think that business would prosper? Customers would take their money to the competitor with the technology that they deemed appropriate for the era, even if the product was inferior to the 1970’s shop. Change is a necessary evil to succeed in business, and ensuring your business is following the best practices of the time, is one of the key facets of remaining relevant.

At the mercy of customer communication preferences

Businesses are at the mercy of how consumers prefer to communicate. Gone are the days when businesses dictated the communication space customers used. Today, it is all about social media, live chat, instant messaging, WhatsApp and any other form of keyboard-friendly communication that customers frequent. As a society, we have grown accustomed to instant messaging with an instant reply, bringing those expectations into the business world, adding pressure to those in customer service to reply quicker, get to answers faster and deliver a better quality service. How does a business cope with these communication pressures?

Online chat software saves the day. It’s the simplest way to engage your customers with a platform that they are familiar with. The added bonus is that live chat is just as direct as a phone call, except, the queues are not as long, and the agent is not as pressed for time. When a customer calls a company, that agent can only speak to them one on one, unlike live chat where a customer service agent can chat with multiple customers at a time. This means that while your customer is waiting in a queue on the telephone to speak with your customer service team, they could have already dealt with the issue online in a fraction of the time.

Let the chatbots take over

That’s not really a statement that you’d like to say all the time, but when it comes to online communication, having a chatbot as your first line of engagement makes a massive difference in productivity. While customers will always prefer to speak with a human, a chatbot engaging can often help the speed the process up by gathering basic information and making sure the customer is transferred to the right customer service agent. Chatbots will boost your customer service ratings, since a chatbot, like Click4Assistance’s Artie, can answer basic questions and help with navigation, so that no human intervention is needed for these types of queries, making your team more efficient. Also, being engaged immediately rather than waiting in a queue is always preferable, even if it means your customer doesn’t get to speak with a human agent.

Chatbots, like Artie, don’t sleep, are never offline and can speak with an unlimited number of website visitors at time, making them the most efficient and productive members of your customer service team. This will take your business to an ‘always-online’ structure, putting you on the map at times when your competitors are sleeping. Your customer service does not have to close just because your office does, and customers remember this. You snooze, you lose!

En garde!

Social media has taken the communication world by storm, and no business has been left untouched. While businesses would love to streamline communication to a singular method of choice, customers are the ones who are controlling the mass of communication with a business. Social media direct messaging, rather than phone or email, has become a mainstay where customers, both retail and commercial, are reaching out to businesses. Click4Assistance has noted this and developed a dashboard with a seamless social media integration to accommodate this, so that your team can access all the incoming messages, all in one place, increasing efficiency and productivity ten fold.

If you’re interested in deploying Click4Assistance, the UK’s premier GDPR compliant live chat software solution, to increase your business’ productivity for 2020, give us a call on 08451235871 or send an email to theteam@click4assistance.co.uk and one of our experts will be with you right away. Not ready to reach out yet? Discover how it works, try a demo, or better yet, try Click4Assistance completely free for 21 days.