If customer retention is a priority for growth this year, then you have to get serious about your customer experience. A priority for any customer experience should be allowing you customers to choose how they interact with your business and for the millennial generation, live chat for customer service is quickly becoming a preferred option.

A recent research study conducted by complaint management research consultancy Software Advice, found that 63% of millennials prefer to have their basic customer support questions answered via live chat. This is a big deal. Millennials already account for $600 Billion in retail sales and Accenture estimates that the millennial generation will represent 30% of retail sales by 2020.

To meet this expectation and increase your online sales, live chat for customer service is a reliable and trustworthy customer experience that caters to any customer active on your website.

If you have not started to interact with customers via chat, you will need to consider a wide range of chat solutions to match your specific business needs and find a partner to scale your team.

Benefits of Live Chat

Convenience and hold time – live chat is convenient for most customers and trained chat teams can significantly reduce hold time. Customers can receive support instantly even if an agent is not immediately available.

Most chat services can operate an automated queue to request customer information and suggest canned responses to provide a solution.

Reduce customer abandonment – Live chat software can be implemented in specific phases of the decision-making and checkout process to reduce abandonment and increase sales.

Whether you are selling retail or services, live chat will connect customers with an agent in critical purchase decision phases. Chat software will let the agent know what page a customer is viewing and ready prepared responses to up-sell or provide immediate support.

Easy to Implement & Scale – The software is easy to implement and is typically just one line of code for your website. An experienced live chat contact center like Stratus (shameless plug) will help you successfully install and prepare a team of agents to engage your consumers.

Key things to consider when choosing live chat software.

Offline Customer Support

Does the chat software solutions provide operators with technical assistance and client support on 24/7 basis? This is critical because a real time tracking of visitors can increase sales and customer loyalty for your website. Responding to questions faster is possible along with finding specifics for interested shoppers, giving incentives, discounts, and receiving feedback.

Offline customer support includes mobile web browsers compatible with smart phones; this makes communication with your customers easy. Hence, even if the operator is not available, you can send a text message to them. When he/she clicks the message, they will have a direct connection with you through the mobile platform.

Canned Responses

Canned responses are preset responses to frequently asked questions. They increase the speed of chat and facilitate better customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is crucial to choose a live chat software solution that provides operators with an opportunity to respond quickly to customer inquiries. A great live chat software solution has the ability to store valuable data from daily operations and produce a complete knowledge base, which in turn helps to formulate canned responses.

Other than giving information about your company, at the core of your website’s purpose is to attract customers and convert them. Normally, visitor will spend around 15 seconds on a website to find out what he/she is looking for. With live chat and canned responses visitors and agents can quickly find resolution or information.

Canned responses increase the speed of resolution and allow the agent to attend to more than one customer at a time. But beware with the robotic canned messages, the best demonstrated practice is to create canned messages that sound human and have transition phrases built into them.

Customization Options

Some live chat software solutions do not have room to cover all the needs your business. Choose a solution that you can customize to keep up with your business needs as well as helps you to adapt to changing situations.

Most solutions facilitate easy customization of chat themes, buttons, chat interface, and chat skins among others. Installing easy customizable solutions ensure that the business can handle consistent brand identity across all marketing channels and brand touch points.

Pricing

What are the cost implications of the live chat software you want? Before you can consider desktop software that features a low cost per single user or web-based software that features a monthly bill. The decision should be based on your specific customer needs, products and website traffic.

Outsource To an Experience Team

You can build your own in-house team; but if this is a new channel, Etech Global Services can help you scale and plan a strategy for the future. Some things to consider: What business needs and I trying to address? How will I define success? What characteristics make a good chat agent? (Hint: They are very different than good voice agents). How do I train new chat agents? How do I gather business intelligence from the chat interactions? How do I fix issues and continually improve?

An experienced team will generate an ROI faster.

A happy customer is a returning customer. 56% of respondents have successfully used live chat at least once. If you offer quality customer service they will come back to your website. Give your consumers the opportunity to chat with operators and we ensure that they will value it.