Tips for live chat outsourcing

Live chat has become a veritable tool for businesses that seek conversion increase in the number of visitors to their website. It allows a representative of the company to answer questions about products and generate more sales through customer engagement using instant messaging.

Managing a live chat is not as easy as installing one on your website. Improper handling can make you wish you didn’t have that plugin in the first place. Conversely, excellent live chat services have been proven to dovetail with increase in conversion, better customer experience, and improved customer services for most businesses. 52% of customers will buy again from companies that offer excellent live chat support, stats have shown.

A properly managed live chat by a skilled agent can be a great asset to your company just as a bot or software program can be a great liability when people are dissatisfied by the services it provides. The problem with a skilled live chat agent is that the cost of having one can make the company’s purse grow lean. So, what’s the way out? Live chat outsourcing!

Live chat outsourcing has many great advantages for your company:

1. In modern e-commerce, the ability to answer customers’ questions while they’re making a purchase makes them more confident about the purchase so that they go through with it.
2. 41% of customers today prefer live chat to 23% that use email to resolve their complaints simply because it is more responsive and faster. Although, customers say they prefer high quality services to speed.
3. The closest option to live chat is a dedicated phone line but this is more expensive to maintain than outsourced live chat. A single live chat operator can respond to several customers at once. This is not possible with a phone line.
4. When customers hit a snag in the purchase process, live chat enables them get the errors resolved rather than shopping elsewhere. The feedback is really great with live chat. You can identify where clients had the most challenges and create a solution for future purchases and future customers
5. When you outsource live chat, you get all these and more for less than hiring in-house live chat agents.

Live Chat Best Practices

For a successfully managed live chat operation, you need the following:

1. Empowerment of your operator. This is especially true when you outsource live chat. They need to be furnished with sufficient information about the company. Also, they should be empowered to make some sales decisions that will help them close deals with customers.
2. The world is a global village but there are different time zones. Customers can decide to make purchases at odd hours. You need to be available to attend to their needs. When you outsource live chat to places outside your company’s time zone, it can help provide customer service at all times unless you’re restricting sales to business hours only.
3. Personal connection. Scripted responses should be avoided. Your live chat agents need to make the chats personal and humane.
4. Conversation backups. Use plugins that allow you save transcripts of a chat with a customer. You can make easy references and study the chat history later to know what you could have done differently to improve customer experience.

Live chat outsourcing can have a direct impact on your sales. The guidelines given will ensure you have a properly managed live chat. These professionals have the experience to peak customer’s interest once they visit your website. Consequently, their lead generation skills will result in conversion increase that will make your sales purse grow really fat.