As companies continue to expand globally in the online space and adopt new technologies to engage customers, expand market share and serve their communities meaningfully, the need to remain competitive on the sales front remains a high priority. Live chat support has traditionally been associated with customer service and has always featured prominently among the preferred service channels of most forward looking companies. That said, live chat support or live support, as it has also been referred to, is being used with a high degree of success to capture new markets, close sales and accelerate business growth.
If you have already installed live chat support on your website or if you are planning to do so, you have yet another good reason to connect the dots and implement a live support solution on your website.
Implement Live Chat Support for Sales and Marketing
Although by no means a cake walk since every outcome calls for a certain level of effort, live chat support can go a long way in increasing your organization’s sales and meeting your projected targets. We present a few ways to help you accomplish this milestone:
Introduce your Live Chat Agents to Marketing Fundamentals
While most chat agents typically belong to a customer service background, you should seriously explore the possibility of introducing them to basic marketing concepts and sales fundamentals. This type of instruction can be provided either by your department head or an industry professional. Also, thoroughly familiarize your chat agents with your company’s products and services. This will also help them to provide a higher brand of customer service.
Use Proactive Chat
Many feature rich live chat software services, including Live2support, provide the Proactive Chat feature. This feature makes it possible for your chat agents to welcome a website visitor on your website through an on-page window. Similar to a small pop-up, this window is unobtrusive and simply invites the visitor to ask for help, submit a query or share a concern. Visitors are in no way obligated to respond to this message. The very fact that this message appears, visitors have reported in surveys, makes them feel comfortable since there is now a face behind the website.
Use Permission-based Email Marketing
Each time visitors arrive on your website and initiate a live chat interaction, they are asked to furnish their email addresses. You can create a database of these email addresses and launch a newsletter to keep your visitors and customers posted regarding your products and services. More importantly, you can engage them with helpful information that they may need some day. Please seek their permission first through an opt-in process because there are rules and statutes in many countries that govern this activity.
Key Takeaways
Live chat support is an excellent way to serve your customer community. Consider taking it to the next level by using it as a marketing tool to grow your business. Once your chat agents begin to wear multiple hats in the customer service and sales realms, they can even close sales on your website live and in real time using some of the advanced features that live chat software provides such as Push URL, co-browsing and screen sharing.