As part of a good lawyer website or general customer service for certain types of businesses, it’s important that when people visit your website, they’re able to access the information they need, including answers to their questions.
So how can you deliver that, especially if someone has a question or needs customer service when you aren’t actually open?
One way to make sure you aren’t missing leads and that you’re providing the best quality customer service is to have a live person available 24/7. Live chat apps are an excellent and cost-effective way to do this.
The following are things to know about live chat apps and the benefits they can have for businesses, including not only law firms but other organizations that capture leads online or need to be ready and available to answer questions at any time.
Table of Contents
1. What is Live Chat?
Live chat on your website is a way to offer real-time conversation combined with the ability to share links and also collect information. Live chat tools will save a full transcript that you can look back at later too.
Live chat support gives people who visit your site and your customers a chance for the back-and-forth, real-time conversations with support agents. The software or tools are embedded in your website.
Studies show that customers prefer live chat in many cases, and compared to other support channels, it tends to have the highest level of support and as a result creates happy customers.
Online chats take place inside a box that’s part of the software or app, and visitors who want to use the feature don’t have to install anything on their computer or device. There’s a chat widget that appears in the corner of your website, and that’s what your visitors will see. The visitors click it, and a chat box appears.
Chat operators can do a lot of things, including seeing what visitors are typing, creating canned responses so they can be faster, and they can access analytics dashboards, as can you.
2. Ways to Use Live Chat
Customer service is really one of the best ways to use live chat. Customers can send files, images, and links.
There are also other ways you can use the live chat in your business.
For example, you can ask customers how things are going to make proactive sales that you might have lost otherwise. You’re providing proactive customer service that not only can save a sale but can also help you learn more about where your business can improve.
When you use live chat, you can specifically measure customer satisfaction by gathering customer feedback.
Live chat tends to be valuable at pinch points in your funnel. The element of having a real-time conversation can help people keep up their momentum.
3. Customer Convenience
When assessing live chat’s benefits for your business, at the top of the list is the convenience for customers it delivers. Live chat will connect your customers instantly with someone, and customers can multitask at the same time. That ability to multitask is one of the reasons customers often cite for preferring live chat delivery of customer service or answers to questions.
The conversation can be stored for the future, which is helpful for users, too, in case they need to refer back to anything.
4. High ROI
Live chat tends to have a high ROI. Businesses are always searching for customer service solutions that are going to be cost-effective but satisfy customers. Live chat tools, compared to many alternatives, are cheaper to implement, and they provide additional benefits.
If you’re looking for a competitive advantage, this could be an opportunity as well. While more and more companies and service providers are implementing live chat, there are still many who haven’t, so you could set yourself apart in a competitive landscape.
5. Increase Sales or Conversions
We’ve briefly touched on this, but regardless of the type of business you are, you want to turn as many leads into clients as you can. Around 83% of customers need some level of support when making online transactions. Live chat can increase conversion rates if people check out your site.
If you’re a business like a law firm, when you can quickly answer someone’s questions, they’re more likely to work with you.
6. Building Trust
When you have live chat on your website, and you have different support options available, you’re building a sense of trust among your audience. People prefer different channels for contact, so the wider the options you can present, the more connected customers and potential customers will feel to you.
Customers will feel that you’re more available and interested in providing them with whatever it is they need at the moment.
You’re equipping yourself to provide longer service hours, including weekends and evenings, when other people are closed.
7. Live Chat vs. Chatbot
It’s worth discussing in this conversation the difference between live chat and chatbot.
Live chat delivers human connection. The support conversations are going to be more empathetic, but chatbots provide automated answers instantly to support queries. You can actually use both.
Chatbots are interfaces that replicate human interactions. They can be used to engage customers, collect customer data and nurture leads.
Chatbots are often powered by AI, and they can be very efficient for the resolution of repetitive or repeat queries, so your agents are then left to deal with more complex issues. With chatbots, there’s no limit to the number of chats they can handle at any given time, and chatbots provide 24/7 support without additional cost.
There are different scenarios where one can work better than another.
For example, if you want personalized responses, live chat is going to win, of course, over a chatbot. On the other hand, if your goal is instant support, chatbots can be better. Chatbots can respond to every customer reaching out for support, even if it’s happening simultaneously. Chatbots eliminate any wait time, whereas, with live chat, customers might have to wait a few minutes to be connected with an agent who can help them.
Overall, either option or both options used together has the potential to bring significant benefits to your business.
