You just landed on the homepage of a website you wanted to explore when, suddenly, someone pops out of nowhere wanting to “help” you. A chat box in the lower right-hand corner of the screen appears — “Hi, I’m Katie. How may I help you?” — accompanied by a picture of a cheerful person radiating pure (but slightly aggressive) helpfulness.
“Who is this woman, and why is she bothering me?” may be your go-to reaction. Or perhaps you think you did something horribly wrong, triggering the website to send emergency aid to put an end to your confusion.
In actuality, you’ve just encountered a valuable new customer service device that has become a favorite for both business owners and many customers alike. Live chats, chatbots and related messaging tools have enhanced the online shopping experience by opening new (speedy) channels of communication between buyer and seller. In parallel, text messaging has given merchants an effective way of connecting with customers who may ignore promotional messages in their email inbox. As a marketing agency, we’ve spent years utilizing marketing automation systems for ourselves and for our clients, and chat-based tech is the next step in this evolution.
Live Chat: Fast Answers, Real Humans
Live chat: friend or foe? As reported by Inc., 44% of online consumers believe that live chat is an important website feature. If you consider younger consumers — those 18-34 — one report found that 60% “regularly use live chat for customer service.”
Here are some of the benefits of a live chat tool for marketers:
• It can speed up response to customers. Live chat gives customers an alternative to calling a customer service number, which takes time and can fuel frustration. Giving customers a direct line of communication can streamline the process of answering their questions.
• It can improve sales and conversions. Being able to address questions at the right time (e.g., when a customer is considering a purchase) can ease friction when they’re considering pressing the final “complete purchase” button. Or a customer may have a problem completing their final purchase, and this tool can be an opportunity to address any issues and complete the sale.
• It can save your company money. Many businesses have call-center services, but the expense doesn’t make it an option for all small- to- midsize businesses. Furthermore, you may only have one dedicated person answering the phone lines. But with live chat, multitasking is possible. Support specialists can easily juggle multiple chat boxes (within reason) in the same way that so many of us keep multiple instant message conversations going.
Here are just a few ways you can make your live chat more effective:
• Prompted activation: So you have live chat. But do your visitors know? Adding an activation prompt (5-10 seconds after your site loads) can call attention to your site’s direct chat capabilities.
• Personalized experience: Add the user’s name or even a different message for returning users such as, “Hi, Matt! Welcome back to our website. Can I help you find anything?”
• Pre-built Q&As: If you get a lot of common questions, you can prebuild answers. Then, if a question isn’t recognized by the system, it will revert to a live, internal team member.
Chatbots: 24/7 Customer Service
Can you comfortably afford a real, live person to be on call 24/7? No? You’re not alone. But that doesn’t mean your customers stop asking questions when you turn the lights out, and your website is where they’re going to start looking for answers.
Chatbots provide a practical way to answer customer questions outside of your normal business hours. This is software that understands and communicates in natural language to simulate normal conversation.
Chatbots, when used wisely, can be time- and money-saving sidekicks. Yes, some marketers still harbor skepticism about chatbots, possibly due to the software’s glitchy past. But the technology has made incredible advancements in recent years.
Here are a few ways you can make your chatbot more effective:
• Give it a name: You can customize the name of your bot to fit your brand, which can help with brand recognition and clearly indicate that the user is interacting with a bot messenger.
• Start simple: Try keeping communications concise, understandable and clear. Too much jargon or too many long answers may confuse users.
• Take it one thing at a time: Your bot may have a million features and updates, but stick with what you need and add new features slowly so you don’t overwhelm your team or users.
Text Messaging: Consumer-Preferred Marketing
Most people have come to accept text messages as part of our everyday lives. In fact, text messages have been shown to have “open and response rates as high as 98% and 45%, respectively,” according to Gartner. Those seem pretty good versus the corresponding open and response rates for email — 20% and 6%.
And before you rule out this marketing method as intrusive or spammy, one survey showed that over 50% of consumers prefer to communicate with businesses via text instead of the phone.
Just make sure you do it the right way. Yes, there is a right way.
Send text messages only to those who have opted in to receive them (like a rewards club), and give them an easy way to opt out the same way you would with your email list. Give recipients options, control and great deals right in the palms of their hands.
Ready To Try Something New?
Chatbots, live chat and text messaging are valuable tools that have made huge improvements since their early awkward years (we know the feeling, right?). So consider giving them a try and, in turn, giving your customers a whole new way to communicate with you.
