Ever wondered why shops have in-store assistants standing in every other corner, waiting to help customers through the buying process? If customers know what they want to buy, and they have come all the way, they won’t need any help to do it, right?
Not really. Customers are spoilt for choices, which they find delightful and frustrating. Buying is not as easy as tossing an item into the cart and swiping the card — they need help to cut through the clutter and arrive at a buying decision. Today, websites are replacing shops, but the need for assistance remains the same. Live chat comes to the rescue, offering digital customers with in-web assistance ever so successfully.
Sales Tips for Live Chat
- Leverage Real-time Engagement to Prevent Drop-offs
- Identify High and Low Potential Leads to Streamline Sales Efforts
- Create Targeted Messaging Plans to Attract Potential Customers
- Use Omnichannel Benefits to Help Customers Pick Where They Left Off
- Perform Customer Profiling to Retarget Customers
- Finally — Build Relational as Opposed to Transactional Relationships
1. Leverage Real-time Engagement to Prevent Drop-offs
A live chat agent can connect with customers in real-time, understand their intent, pain points, and guide them with best-suited recommendations — a goal every communication channel aims for but rarely succeeds. All other channels restrict service agents to attending one customer at a time. Agents can’t be on two calls or respond to multiple emails at the same time. But live chat enables agents to handle multiple chats simultaneously while keeping even chat distribution in check.
Businesses answer 80% of live chat messages within 40 seconds. This sort of speed will create a positive impression on any customer and prevents them from dropping off with unanswered questions. Even when the question is out of the live chat agent’s scope, the agent can transfer it to the appropriate team and move on to the next chat session. With live chat, you get to give every opportunity a shot.
2. Identify High and Low Potential Leads to Streamline Sales Efforts
Once in a while, every salesperson spends far too much time on a lead that will never convert. The reason is that, in sales, you have to know who you are talking to and what their needs are. It is impossible to know this unless you are dealing with a return customer. The first step in lead nurturing is to talk to the person and understand their intent. A visitor asking about the Christmas sale half a year away has a low conversion potential than a visitor who is sure of the model, color, and capacity of the car he or she wants to buy.
Live chat agents cut the slack for sales reps by qualifying leads before the leads reach the sales funnel. Lead qualification is the process of determining the conversion potential of a lead and how high or low is the chance. With live chat and chatbots at the frontline handling simple requests and know-how questions, the sales team will only have high-quality leads left to focus on. Thus, marketers and sales teams can use live chat to their efforts effectively and streamline their work.
3. Create Targeted Messaging Plans to Attract Potential Customers
Customers don’t always have a clue what they want to buy or what they have saved in their cart. They could just be browsing or doing a price comparison. While they are not exactly high-quality leads, they are still browsing your website intentionally. The same goes for your Facebook followers. They may not purchase today, but someday they might.
Live chat features enable you to actively reach out to these customers with proactive targeted messaging. You can trigger event-based messages to begin live chat conversations that may potentially end in transactions. Since there is no need for ice-breaking, you can turn hesitant leads into active customers with suitable questions, timely follow-ups, and individualized attention.
4. Use Omnichannel Benefits to Help Customers Pick Where They Left Off
Anyone who clicked on your brand name is a potential new customer regardless of where they reached you — web, social media, or phone app. Customers may also switch between channels in the middle of a transaction, making omnichannel customer engagement, a concept that blends experiences across all channels, widely popular. Live chat is highly capable of integrating with internal as well as external channels such as Facebook Messenger.
So, you need not restrict your sales radar to your website. You can pocket every sales opportunity with the access to meet customers where they are. If a person abandons the website or cart and later pays a Facebook visit, you know where to continue from.
5. Perform Customer Profiling to Retarget Customers
While live chat was created to replicate the brick-and-mortar experience on the website, it has evolved into much more. A tremendous advantage of a live chat tool is the headstart it gives you in terms of information. To guide customers in their buying journey, you need to know more than what they convey — their purchase history, buying behavior, preferences, and current needs so that you make the best recommendations. This is called customer profiling, which refers to creating portraits of customers based on their purchase history and past interactions.
Live chat helps you track the customer journey for customer profiling and uses CRM integrations to bring it to you when you need it. With access to context, businesses often see a commendable increase in the average order value and recurring online purchases.
6. Finally — Build Relational as Opposed to Transactional Relationships
Live chat is a successful form of virtual communication as it involves human interactions. While it’s true that live chat serves as a great platform to increase conversion rates and sales, you need not limit live chat to scoring leads. Live chat is one of the quickest and easiest ways to spark conversations with your website visitors. They may write reviews, submit feedback, click on star ratings, but only on live chat do they address you face to face (or text to text).
Leverage the benefits of live chat to build relational (based on loyal, long-term value) as opposed to transactional (based on single-sale, short-term value) relationships. You can do this by shifting the focus from selling to empathetic conversations once in a while. Instead of just selling a product or service, you can guide the customers on how to derive the maximum value out of it. Once you gain customers’ trust, sales will keep coming your way. Lastly, use a solid analytics tool such as HappyFox Business Intelligence to measure your live chat metrics for sustained sales growth and customer satisfaction.
Is it Worthwhile to Leverage Live Chat Sales?
When customers have unanswered questions while browsing your website, they won’t think twice to drop off or switch to a different website. Live chat can be used as a versatile sales tool for lead generation, customer profiling, up-selling, targeted messaging, retargeting, and a host of other functions. According to surveys, if you offer live chat, 38% of customers are more likely to buy from you, and 63% of customers are more likely to return.
The need for a fast response is highest in sales engagement, and live chat enables you to be at the right place at the right time, not letting any opportunity fall through the cracks.
Final Thoughts on Live Chat for Sales
The key is also to know when to sell and when to support — since selling is only the start of a long journey to come. Once you implement live chat successfully, set up a sales process based on your industry type, customers, and priorities. The best part is, digital marketing and online sales prove to be successful for low-touch e-commerce brands as well as high-touch B2B brands.
HappyFox offers a chat solution that is easy to integrate with your help desk and offers unlimited agents on all pricing plans. If you are searching for an efficient live chat solution to boost sales, chat support, and customer experience, try HappyFox Chat for free!
