A major problem you have as a business is that customers don’t always need your products or services at a time that’s convenient to you.

You might have the perfect solution, but if you’re not available when your customer needs it, they aren’t going to come to you.

Really, you need to be available 24/7.

But it’s impossible to provide this level of service using people. As a minimum you’d need three people constantly on call doing eight hour shifts each, back-to-back.

Plus holiday cover, plus sickness cover, plus benefits and time off for breaks.

The money alone would be enough to put a strain on any business.

However, most businesses today already have the best solution to this 24/7 customer service and sales problem.

Your website is the best salesperson you have

If you have a business website, you have the platform for the best salesperson or customer support agent you could possibly have.

It’s available 24/7, it doesn’t take breaks, it doesn’t ask for holidays, you don’t have to pay for benefits or incentives.

Your website just sits there, full of all the resources and answers your customers need ready for them to land on a page.

The problem is helping people navigate your website so they find what they need quickly.

This is when live chat comes in.

Get your customers what they need, quickly

When a customer lands on your website, very often they’re not completely sure what they’re looking for, or where they need to go to find it.

Most of the time, they’ve come to you after putting a query into Google and your business has come up towards the top.

Sometimes they’ll know where to go. If they’re trying to buy a t-shirt for example they’ll be able to navigate towards that part of the site on their own.

Other times, they might have a question they’re looking for a specific answer for.

If they can’t find it quickly, they’ll move on and try another website.

Live chat can instantly provide the information they’re looking for by asking a few questions, and then directing people to what they need based on the answer.

There are several other benefits too to having live chat on your website.

Create a 24/7 evolving sales and customer service function

The biggest benefit of live chat is it’s available on your website whenever a customer lands on a page. It doesn’t matter if it’s 2:30 in the morning when your team is asleep.

Live chat offers the same level of service as a sales person. Asking questions to qualify what a customer is looking for, and then pointing them to the information they need.

Even if it can’t provide the exact answer at the time, it can take a customer’s information and forward it onto a suitable person to follow up when they’re available.

Plus, because your sales person will have the background of the enquiry, the customer won’t have to go through the same round of basic questions again.

Once you’ve provided the information, you can add the new response into your live chat so the next time someone asks a similar question, the live chat will be able to answer it.

Reach more qualified customers

As good as your sales team is, they can only reach a certain number of people in a day.

If they’re dealing with cold leads, they have to spend more time warming those leads up for a sale, which can take a long time and there’s no guarantee it will happen.

Live chat can take this early lead qualification off your sales team’s hands to understand where a lead is in the sales cycle, and only pass them off to sales if they’re qualified.

This will save your team the time of trying to figure out whether a lead is close to buying, and free them up to spend more time on leads closer to making a purchase.

Also, because the leads are coming through your website, you can be more confident in getting better quality leads.

Expand customer support

When a customer needs support with their product or service, they expect that support whenever they need it, not when it’s convenient for you.

Unfortunately, you can’t always guarantee you’ll have someone available to provide support to customers, especially if a problem comes up out of your regular business hours.

Fortunately, customers today are more open to educating themselves about a problem first, and even trying to solve it themselves before phoning customer support.

It’s why so many of the more popular YouTube videos and Google searches start with “How to”.

But when someone comes to your website looking for support or information, they might not know where to look.

Rather than force them to click through pages trying to find an answer to a simple question, live chat can ask them a few basic qualifying questions and then direct them to the answer or resource they need.

Increase website conversions

Customers want access to information or products quickly so they can make a decision and move on.

With so many businesses competing against each other with similar products, it’s often the ones who can provide information, or direct customers to the right place the quickest that win.

According to research by Forrester, 50% of adults will abandon a purchase if they can’t get a quick answer to a question.

And live chat is a proven way to improve the customer experience on your website and increase conversions.

In one study by invesp, customers who engaged with a live chat spent 60% more per purchase than other customers and were 2.8 times more likely to buy something after using live chat on a website.

Create a personalised experience

All customers want to feel special.

Like they get treated better than every other customer who comes through the door, or onto your website.

Live chat is a great way to introduce better personalisation to your website, because each individual chat is adapted specifically, and automatically, based on each customer interaction.

By engaging with live chat, your customer gets to ask exactly what they want and gets directed straight to the information they need for the best experience and increasing the chances they’ll spend money with you.

Reduce your sales expenses

Earning sales and winning new customers can be costly for your company in salaries, bonuses and holiday and sick pay for a large sales team.

Having live chat on your website helps reduce this cost drastically by creating a sales function on your website that can help qualify leads and pass them onto a smaller sales team to close.

Because teams aren’t spending as much of their time cold calling or qualifying leads themselves, they can be more productive with their time and spend it on leads with a higher chance of spending money.

Make your business more productive

One of the biggest productivity killers your team will face is dealing with repetitive queries from customers.

These are usually queries which are easy to answer or resolve, but come in such high volumes they take up lots of time dealing with them all.

Live chat can remove these repetitive questions by pointing customers towards the answers on your website, rather than calling your support team.

This frees your team up to concentrate on more complex customer issues that take longer to resolve and provide more benefits.

Turn your website into the best salesperson in your business

Your website can provide you with so many more benefits than just acting as a shop window for your products and services.

By putting live chat on your site, you can create a better, more personalised service for customers that is available to them 24/7 to answer all their sales questions and guide them towards the right products, or give them a high level of customer support exactly when they need it.

Want to learn more about how live chat can benefit your business?

Get in touch with us today.