5 reasons why customers prefer chat over call

 Customer service is the mainstay of any business, playing a vital role in forming a sustainable customer base and allowing companies to flourish.

In this digital era, live chat is a fundamental part of a successful customer service toolkit, delivering a platform to communicate with customers in real-time.

Why is Live chat important for your business?

• Real time assistance to customers

The best perk of live chat is that customers get real time advice and answers to any queries they have..

• Live chat saves money

Live chat is cost efficient in 3 effective ways

• It increases efficiency by allowing live chat agents to handle multiple chats simultaneously, thus you don’t need to hire more agents.

• It reduces overall helpdesk center costs by lowering the waiting queue time

• It saves product return expenses as a live chat representative can help you choose the best product or service, which best suits the customer.

• Get competitive advantage

The amount of business competitors is immense and is increasing every day. Businesses are recognizing the importance of providing real time customer service, and implementing live chat to stay one step forward of the rivalry.

• Increase conversions and sales

Multiple research proves that livechat can make a 20%+ increase in conversion rates. Having a person who can walk you through a purchase adds confidence and customers tend to spend more than the ones who don’t use live chat. A positive experience leads to a higher average order value, hence your sales are directly transformed by live chat.

• Build strong relationships

When customers feel their voice is heard and they chat with a person behind the company, it’s more likely that they’ll have a stronger connection to your business and share their positive feedback.

Here are the reasons your business must have chat software is due to the increased adoption of more than half of all customers who prefer to chat with someone in real-time and online, rather than call a company for support.

Quick responses equals happy customers and a lowered burden on your customer success team.

And the simple reason behind this is  – your customers hate waiting!

This type of instant interaction has changed the way companies communicate with their customers. 

The Live chat statistics for 2021 shows that- 

J.D. Power found that live chat has grown the leading digital communication method for online customers, as a staggering 42% of customers prefer live chat compared to just 23% for email, and 16% for social media or forums.

According to CrazyEgg 38% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company  that offers live chat support.  Also, chat is an effective way to get visitors back to your website, as Emarketer discovered that 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat.

Kayako reported that 79% of businesses said that using a live chat resulted in increased customer loyalty, sales and revenue.

Goinflow noted that there was a 3.84% increase in conversion rates, with a 6% overall growth in revenue.

ICMI found that website visitors that connect with your company via live chat are worth 4.5 times more than visitors that don’t.

Forrester discovered that there was a 10% increase in the average order value when reviewing the sales from customers who engaged in a chat before making a purchase, than those that previously did not use chat.

Forrester's Raising the Bar report noted that 1 in 5 customers are willing to stop using a product or service for delayed response times via online chat.

In addition to this, a study by AMA found that live chat can be used successfully throughout the customer journey, including an enhancement in:

• Marketing awareness (+29%)

• Early stage sales development (+32%)

• Post-sales customer support (+39%)

All of which accelerates to an increase in revenue!

Live Chat support extends a host of benefits over traditional call support, but that doesn’t lead you to the conclusion that phone support is obsolete, call centers are still abundant. Let us compare pros and cons of live chat vs phone support

Pro and cons: Live chat

Pros

Cons

Live chat has the ability to render proactive support to reach out to customers browsing your website first and initiate a encouraging relationship between the customer and your brand. Customer queries can be resolved at a faster pace with the combined efforts of automated systems and live agents which means more in your company is able to tackle maximum no.of customer's issues. Live chat provides fast analysis of data gathered from various sources and also takes up less stage space.

The live chat is always in real time but often a customer may lag the immediacy to respond which may result in abandoning the chat. Live chat programs are much more susceptible to abuse and cyber-attack. Agents may begin copying and pasting frequently used replies to customer inquiries without even properly understanding the customer’s needs and updating the template answer to deliver more personal experience.

Pros and cons: Phone support

Pros	Cons
Deeper analytics- Tone of voice, language used, whether the customer laughed and why, etc. can give your analysts deep insight into customer behavior. The rate of transferring information is significantly increased without the need to type out every sentence, and customers can often get multiple queries resolved in a single phone call,	Phone conversations usually include an initial interaction with an auto-attendant, before the customer is routed to the right agent, where they find themself on hold before the actual conversation can take up which might irritate the customer to hang up. Phone support cannot address more than one inquiry at a time which results in lower efficiency.

There has been a constant competition between Live chat vs Call. Therefore it is essential to understand the need of your business and the importance of both live chat and call support to recognise the right time for each channel.

The benefits of Live chat  will also explain the reasons why customers prefer chat over call -

• The promptness of response

There is no wait time for someone to pick up your call or email. The response is almost immediate and no unnecessary delay.

• Issues resolved at a faster pace

Live chat provides the opportunity to get quicker resolution to your problems speaking to a person you know rather than a computer generated system that is yet to be updated.

• The customers can multitask 

With live chat you can engage in it whilst you are working on some other things.

Live chat offers you to multitask, whilst someone is answering all of our questions.

• The interaction is easy and quick

A live chat agent can make your transaction a lot more easy. They have the ability to locate a customer on their website and direct them to a product or resolution they need without the need to search for the answers on the website.

• Live chat is free 

There is no additional charge for using live chat. You do not have to install anything to access it

With live chat, customers avoid unnecessary charges and business avoids losing you!

Considering the Live chat as the best choice to go for, companies are leveraging the benefits of chat software and adopting it rapidly to grow their business scale.

Engage your customers in real time with Kapturechat solution.