10 Benefits of Live Chat You Should Know in 2024

What is live chat?

Live chat is a real-time communication tool that allows individuals to interact with businesses directly on websites or applications via text-based messaging. Accessed through designated chat widgets, it facilitates instant communication without the need for users to switch platforms. Live chat enables businesses to engage with website visitors promptly, addressing inquiries, providing assistance, and offering support as issues arise. 

This proactive approach enhances customer satisfaction, captures leads, drives sales, and fosters relationships. It also allows businesses to gather valuable insights into customer preferences and pain points, informing product development and marketing strategies. For customers, live chat offers a convenient means of seeking assistance without lengthy phone calls or email exchanges, contributing to a seamless user experience. Its versatility and immediacy make it a vital tool for modern customer engagement in today’s fast-paced world.

Should your business implement a live chat customer support system?

When considering whether to implement a live chat customer support system for your business, evaluating its suitability is essential based on your company's specific needs and goals. Assess factors such as your target audience's preferences, the volume and complexity of customer inquiries, and your team's capacity to manage live chat interactions effectively. Additionally, consider the potential impact on your existing customer support channels and processes and the resources required for implementation and maintenance. Ultimately, the decision should align with your overarching customer service strategy and objectives, ensuring that it enhances overall customer satisfaction and effectively supports your business growth efforts.

What are the top 10 benefits of live chat

Businesses across the globe are focusing on creating a better customer experience than just being response-driven. Live chat has evolved, allowing businesses to focus on the bigger picture. If you are still contemplating live chat as a solution for your team, you are already late to the game. But, better late than never—here’s how live chat can benefit your business in 2024: 

1. Engage with customers and prospects in real-time

Live chat is rapidly evolving to be one of the quintessential support options for businesses. This is primarily because live chat offers real-time assistance to its customers. Customers hate it when their calls are put on hold or they receive delayed email responses. Live chat support has eliminated these issues for customers. With a chat widget embedded in your webpage, your customers can reach out to you instantaneously and get their queries resolved. 

According to recent Freshworks research, 44% of customer service leaders claim that chat and messaging were critical in maintaining service levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tool's ease of use and convenience have made live chat the most preferred support channel. You can use live chat to engage with all visitors rather than just offering meaningful support.

2. Offer personalized, contextual support with instant feedback

Personalized support is essential for customers. When your support is contextual and offers the right solution based on the context of a customer’s previous interactions, it offers a personal touch, minimizes customer effort, and enhances satisfaction. A report by McKinsey showed that lack of personalization is one of the major roadblocks observed when it comes to companies offering the best support possible. 

With live chat for business, customer service agents can see purchase history, product details, and customer profiles on a single chat interface. Using this information, agents can tailor the customer’s experience. Unlike email support, personalization happens in real time, creating an empathetic bond with the customer. Live chat’s ability to be asynchronous gives the customer complete ownership of the conversation by enabling them to choose their time to request support. 

3.  Turn customer service into customer delight with proactive support

Most customer support is reactive; it is always the customers who reach out to the support team to get their issues solved. Proactive support is about reaching out to your customers to offer solutions or solve their issues before the customer even raises a ticket. 

In this digitally driven world, customers expect a better support experience than just answers to their problems. If your business aims to create happy and loyal customers, you should swear by proactive support as your business strategy. 

You can send out proactive messages to your website visitors by setting up triggered messages. It is also important to note that you should send the right trigger messages to your audience. With Freshworks triggered messages, you can set triggers based on the type of audience, their location, and their activity on your website. When used right, proactive messaging is a powerful marketing tool that promotes customer satisfaction and creates brand advocates for life. 

4.  Boost sales and increase conversions

Did you know that more than 50% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with a company that offers live chat support? A website's Live chat support is equivalent to a store assistant. Customers often require assistance while making online transactions, and chat offers them an immediate way to reach out to a brand, ask questions that help them make a purchase decision, and—with the right integrations—offer access to payment portals, ticket booking apps, and much more. Perhaps that’s why 38% of customers said they had made their purchase after a single chat session! 

Live chat can boost sales by nudging website visitors to complete their purchases. How often have you added items to your online shopping cart and then abandoned it, or for whatever reason, simply closed the tab? Unfortunately for businesses, you’re not alone.

Cart abandonment is a major issue with e-commerce, and millions of dollars are lost to it. Having a chat widget on the website shows that you are there to solve any hindrances while making a purchase. While some customers claim they are just browsing, you can proactively converse with those interested in your products or services. Reach out to them with the right message to assist them in making that purchase. This will help you reduce cart abandonment rates and increase conversion rates. 

5. Manage more conversations 

For a customer service agent, talking on the phone with a customer is ‘unitasking’ at its finest. Other than pulling up a customer on file, there’s not much else a support agent can do while on a call unless they put a customer on hold.

However, with live chat for business, the same agent can handle more than one customer query at a time. They can easily ask a question in one live chat window and shoot over a response to another in the time it takes the first to respond. For instance, say it takes your reps an average of six minutes to answer individual support calls. Completing a live chat interaction may take six minutes, but each agent could handle two chats simultaneously.

SuprDaily, a subscription-based delivery service, handled 4000 daily chat messages with just 50 agents. With Freshworks, their agents were able to handle multiple chat conversations concurrently. Chat helped scale their support and reduced their operational costs. 

Live chat for business helps you optimize the number of customers that your agents can support while still giving customers instant responses. With an increase in concurrency, support teams will have lower backlogs and won’t have to grow their support teams significantly. 

6. Set up canned responses and automation to boost agent productivity 

You can set your chat team up for increased success in a few simple yet highly impactful ways.  Canned responses, for example, are pre-written templates of answers to common customer questions. These could be as simple as, “What time does your store open?” and even address more procedural, repetitive questions such as, “How can I return my purchase?”

Instead of having to pen these answers from scratch each time, agents should be able to find the relevant answer effortlessly and hit send. With a little personalization, these canned responses can seem natural and unscripted while drastically increasing your agent’s response and resolution time. 

Support teams also often spend precious time assigning tickets to the right agents. To run an efficient team, agents are usually divided into product or function-based teams, channel-based teams, or region-based teams. For instance, based on your product or service, you can create a team of agents that focus only on technical difficulties, live chat, or US-based customers. With the right assignment rules, tickets raised with these parameters will be auto-assigned to the team best suited to handle them. Auto-assign can also review the workload of that team and either round-robin or assign tickets to the right agent based on the agent’s current workload. Aside from optimizing the response time, this also saves the agents from having to re-route the customers if they are connected to a different live chat agent. This level of self-service is a win-win for both users and agents.

Klarna, a Swedish fintech company, reduced their response time to 60 seconds after deploying Freshworks. With IntelliAssign, they were able to auto-route tickets to the right agent without making their customers wait a long time to get connected. 

7. Give your brand a competitive advantage

Though live chat seems very popular right now, there are still lots of businesses that have yet to provide live chat support to customers. Only a little more than 60% of businesses offer live chat support. Having excellent live chat support offers you an edge over your competitors. When customers stumble across an issue, they are likely to opt for the support channel that is readily available to them. In the pandemic era, for example, businesses had to make customer support completely virtual. Many businesses that did not deliver an exceptional digital experience did not survive.  

8. Improve customer acquisition and onboarding results

Implementing live chat can significantly improve customer acquisition and onboarding results for businesses by facilitating real-time engagement with potential customers during crucial stages of the sales process. By offering instant assistance and personalized guidance, businesses can address prospective customers' inquiries, alleviate concerns, and provide relevant information, ultimately enhancing their purchasing experience. This proactive approach increases the likelihood of converting leads into customers and fosters a positive initial impression, laying the foundation for long-term relationships.

Live chat enables businesses to streamline onboarding by guiding new customers through key steps and addressing any questions or challenges they may encounter in real time. This proactive support can significantly reduce friction and frustration, leading to a smoother and more efficient onboarding experience. By providing immediate assistance and support during this critical phase, businesses can increase customer satisfaction, minimize dropout rates, and accelerate time-to-value, ultimately maximizing the lifetime value of each customer. 

9. Offer 24/7 support for customers

One significant benefit of implementing live chat for businesses is the ability to provide 24/7 support, ensuring assistance is available around the clock regardless of time zones or geographical locations. This accessibility caters to the diverse needs and preferences of today's global customer base, offering peace of mind and reassurance that help is always just a click away. By eliminating the constraints of traditional business hours, businesses can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty by promptly addressing inquiries, resolving issues, and providing support whenever it's needed. This continuous availability strengthens customer relationships and positions businesses as reliable and customer-centric brands in a competitive market.

Moreover, offering 24/7 support through live chat enables businesses to stay responsive and agile in dynamic environments, effectively handling urgent matters and crises as they arise. Whether it's troubleshooting technical issues, assisting with urgent inquiries, or providing guidance during emergencies, live chat ensures that customers receive timely assistance and solutions regardless of the time of day. This proactive approach to customer support mitigates potential disruptions to the customer experience and demonstrates a commitment to prioritizing customer needs and satisfaction at all times. As a result, businesses can foster trust, loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth referrals, driving long-term success and growth.

10. Helps gain data that better inform product and marketing decisions

<p>Live chat provides a wealth of data insights that can be used to inform product and marketing decisions. By analyzing chat transcripts and monitoring customer interactions in real-time, businesses can gain valuable intelligence into customer preferences, pain points, and emerging trends. This granular level of insight allows businesses to identify patterns, common inquiries, and areas for improvement, enabling them to make informed decisions about product and marketing development.</p>

Live chat also allows businesses to gather feedback and conduct surveys directly within the chat interface. This real-time feedback loop provides businesses with immediate insights into customer satisfaction, sentiment, and areas for improvement, enabling them to iterate and refine their products and marketing messages accordingly. By leveraging this continuous feedback mechanism, businesses can stay agile and responsive to changing market dynamics, ensuring their offerings remain relevant and competitive.

Make the most out of live chat with integrations and AI

Live chat can reap more benefits with integrations. Here’s how: 

• Messaging channels: Your customers are probably “chatting” on messaging apps. Chat gives your business access to billions of consumers who use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and other apps. Live chat integrations with messenger apps will allow you to start a conversation with your customers without requiring them to visit your website. You don’t have to use them just for support— these messenger apps can also proactively engage leads and visitors. You can nurture different groups of visitors over a period of time through low-touch and streamlined messaging, making it a great channel for lean or budget-strapped teams.

• Chatbots: Chatbots and live chat are the best combo ever. They work hand-in-hand and elevate the support experience for your customers. Chatbots can be deployed on your chat software and perform marvels for your support team and business overall. 

• Co-browsing apps: Co-browsing is one of the most effective techniques to solve complex customer technical issues. Co-browsing offered on live chat makes it even easier for customers and agents to jump right into the issue without switching devices or screens, unlike phone support. Integrating your live chat tool with a co-browsing app like Team Viewer helps solve customer issues quickly and effectively. 

→ Automate common queries: AI-enabled chatbots are extremely well-equipped to handle all common queries. For instance, Freshworks’ Freddy bot uses AI and machine learning to resolve common queries with the most suitable answers in an instant. It continuously learns from customer interactions to deliver a better customer experience every time and improve satisfaction rates.

→ Intent-driven messages: Customers aren’t fond of chatbots that sound completely robotic. Bots are capable of identifying intent and driving meaningful conversations with customers that result in conversions or simply boost engagement. It can segment customers based on their behavior and send targeted messages proactively. Learn more about chatbots.

→ Forms and scheduling: Most sales teams will tell you that the bottleneck in converting leads into customers is getting them to take a demo of the product. While websites are filled with lead forms and demo request buttons, it’s difficult to convince the customer to take that step. Integrating your live chat software with calendar apps like Google Calendar or Calendly will let you easily book meetings and schedule demos with your prospects. This lets your sales team spend more time giving demos rather than making appointments. 

→ 24/7 Support: Chatbots help you offer support round the clock. If it is a complex issue demanding human intervention, it can pass on the information to an agent during business hours, saving you from losing out on leads and customers. This also saves you the cost of hiring extra agents to offer 24/7 support.

Future-proof with live chat

Since its inception, live chat has been the fastest way for customers to reach teams. Live chat benefits businesses by giving customers faster answers, helping support teams serve more customers, and optimizing the entire support process, even for small businesses. Customers want fast, personalized support, and live chat is uniquely positioned to give them that. 

With automation, your teams will be able to solve problems on a higher level rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of every query. This can be on multiple communication channels such as social media, within a knowledge base, within a product, or even when a real person answers the phone. Whether you are a small business or are managing enterprise-scale operations, live chat is a natural fit that optimizes the time agents spend on a customer without compromising the quality of service. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to wow your customer.