Benefits of Chat (and 5 Ways to Increase Engagement)

Before implementing a chat platform, it is valuable to pause and comprehend the reasons behind wanting to provide chat features. While this may appear to be an insignificant or nonsensical idea to deliberate, it is important to avoid promoting chat for the sake of chat without a well-defined strategy. Chat serves as a tool intended to achieve specific objectives, such as boosting sales, establishing brand recognition, or enhancing customer service effectiveness.

Regardless of the type of interaction being measured, it is important to have specific objectives in mind. Consider your email campaigns as an example. While you want your subscribers to open and benefit from the content, your ultimate goal is to achieve conversions. The same principle applies to chat. Companies should deliberately implement chat with a clear objective of generating specific results from these interactions.

Firstly, ensure that you establish clear objectives regarding your chat strategy. These objectives may encompass enhancing brand recognition, obtaining a higher number of mailing list subscriptions, or generating increased product sales. Whatever your initial goals may be, it is essential to precisely define them in a manner that is clear and measurable.

Using chat to generate sales

Many businesses implement chat to increase sales because it caters well to the fast-paced nature of today’s customers who are often busy, multitasking, and impatient. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, if website visitors can’t find what they’re looking for within a minute, they are likely to leave. Besides factors like web design, page loading speed, and navigation ease, chat can enhance user-friendliness by assisting shoppers in quickly finding what they need on your site.

Through the act of chatting, customers can obtain information about which product suits their needs and also receive responses to commonly asked questions. The inclusion of chat functionality can enhance the likelihood of conversions on e-commerce platforms as it allows customers to swiftly access informative content. It is important to ensure that chat agents are equipped with thorough knowledge about the latest products and offerings in order to provide customers with optimal experiences and accurate information, thereby leading to an increase in conversions.

Using chat for customer support

One useful way to utilize chat is for customer support. Providing chat on your website for customer support comes with various benefits such as higher CSAT, quicker response times, decreased cost-per-interaction, and so on. Below are a few suggestions:

• Make sure your chat agents are well versed in chat etiquette. They are a reflection on your brand so they must always be polite and courteous even when customers aren’t.
• When chat agents can’t answer a question, they should make it easy for customers to connect with the right person or set up clear internal processes for transferring chats among teams.
• Connect chat with other useful resources. In some cases, the customer’s question is already answered on an FAQ page, a training video, or on another page of your website. Rather than having your rep repeat these answers over and over, have them provide the appropriate links or redirect the visitor to the correct page. This frees up space for other customers to chat.

Chat can help you build your brand

Adding a chat feature to your website is an effective way to enhance brand recognition. Your website serves as a representation of your brand, and incorporating a chat function provides a dynamic and personalized touch. This allows visitors to actively interact with your site instead of simply browsing passively. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that your chatbot aligns with the desired brand voice.

When training your agents, it is important to take into account your buyer persona. Just like brick and mortar businesses consider their customers when hiring and instructing staff, the same approach should be applied to training digital representatives. It is crucial to consider your overall brand image and the preferred treatment of customers. For instance, some businesses have a formal image, while others have a more casual or humorous one. This consistent reflection should also extend to chat sessions. Using emojis during chat sessions can be a way for chat agents to effectively engage with customers.

Chat can reduce email and call volume

Although chat cannot entirely replace other forms of customer support, it can effectively handle numerous frequently asked questions and problems. By utilizing live chat agents to assist in sales and customer support, your business will experience a reduction in calls and emails. Consequently, you can enhance efficiency by allocating your and your employees’ attention to other duties while ensuring that customers receive the necessary assistance through chat.

Five tips to increase chat engagement

In order to increase customer engagement for your chat function, it is important to recognize that chat is just one component of your website. To make visitors feel more comfortable engaging, it is crucial to seamlessly incorporate chat into your website design. Here are a few suggestions for enhancing customer engagement with your chat function:

• Chat button and window placement is key. Site visitors simply can’t initiate a chat session if they don’t know it’s available and can’t find your chat widget. At the same time, you don’t want it to obstruct the view of your main content. UsabilityGeek recommends placing chat buttons in the lower right corner of website pages for optimal UX.
• Give visitors a chance to get settled. Rather than having the chat window open immediately upon page load (which honestly feels rather abrupt in most cases), give visitors at least 15-30 seconds to look around.
• Unless you have a specific reason for hiding the chat button on certain URLs of your website (which is entirely possible), it’s generally a good idea to make the chat button and window visible on all of your web pages.
• Make sure you have a clearly marked button for initiating chats. Many companies have started experimenting with using less-than-obvious icons for their chat buttons, leaving visitors second-guessing their true purpose. It’s best to stick with a chat button that’s designed with an obvious chat/chat bubble/etc icon, text, or both.
• Track analytics for chat sessions. Whether you use in-app reporting tools (SnapEngage offers a full suite of reports), Google Analytics, or other reporting methods, it’s critical to measure chat platform analytics related to agent performance, visitor and audience information, chat activity data, and more.