When you build your company website, it can be tempting to keep things simple at first. First impressions and user experience are what most businesses will focus on, and then perhaps functionality of the site may be an afterthought. Extra functions on a website are normally overlooked due to the misconception that they’re costly or over complicated or will cause extra work for anyone in the business that needs to manage “behind the scenes” of the website. It’s true that a little time investment needs to be made to get to know a new website and its capabilities, but that time will be well spent if the business is focusing on tools that can add value to the business and save time. Website Live Chat is one such tool and there are several reasons why it’s a very valuable tool for customer-based businesses:

1) Web chat helps customer satisfaction in a number of ways
A lot of customers actually prefer web chat to talking with someone over the phone. One major reason for this is that although there still may be a short wait for an operator, waiting for web chat doesn’t feel anywhere near as tedious as listening to hold music on the phone. Another benefit of web chat is that the customer can multi-task while they wait for an answer. This is great for any business to business sites as it means whoever is trying to get hold of you can carry on working in the background, allowing them to make time for quick questions they may never have asked you if they’d had to pick up the phone.

Furthermore, web chat is a free form of communication for the customer, and this is particularly helpful for customers who need to contact you from a different country because they are travelling for business, or just on holiday and have some time to shop around. If you’re a travel business, it’s certain that you’ll have customers wanting to contact you from all over the world so make it easy for them to contact you without the worry of a big phone bill.

2) The benefits to your bottom line
Again, multi-tasking! Your customer service agents can only speak with one person at a time on the phone. When using web chat, it’s possible to have multiple chat windows open so that agents can look after a number of customers at once. This cuts down waiting time and saves on people resources. Web chat also allows you to keep your customer service department open for longer hours with minimal costs. With the right set up, your agents can even work from home saving you office overheads, and these support hours could take place at any time of the day or night if you have willing staff or perhaps team members who want to earn some extra through overtime.

And as we mentioned above, customers that might not have contacted you previously are more likely to “give it a go” if they see your live chat box pop up with someone ready and willing to help, offering your business the opportunity to generate extra sales.

3) A safety net for complaints and a useful training tool
All web chats are recorded, so this leaves an audit trail for any complications or complaints that may arise from a customer contacting you. You can see who said what, and you can also see the customer’s data such as their name and email address. This is useful for following up with customers and very useful for an audit and training tool for you to develop your team.

Getting Started with Live Chat
It’s very easy to get started with live chat on your website. Just Some Coding can act quickly to install the right tools for your team to be able to access and manage the chats, and your customers will be able to access it as soon as it’s switched on. Very basic training would be needed for support staff and the cost to get the Live Chat set up is very minimal. There’s no real reason why you wouldn’t want to make use of Live Chat on your website! Contact or wed development team today to find out how you can increase sales enquiries and save time and money with Live Chat.

Main image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay