In many respects, the internet is like a giant shopping centre. Online shoppers now expect a similar customer experience to a bricks-and-mortar shop. When they visit an online eCommerce store or your business website, they wish to have their questions answered, and they want help to be at hand immediately.
Fully managed live chat can provide immediate answers, build rapport with customers and increase sales – much like a sales assistant would in a retail store.
Unlike most retail stores, your website is open 24/7. Your website itself can be your best salesperson and sales assistant, but only if you invest in user experience and conversion rate optimisation.
Identifying your target audience, marketing to them, and getting them to visit your website takes time and effort. Whether you are targeting and marketing to customers through channels including search engine optimisation (SEO), online advertising, social media, or offline marketing channels – campaigns often cost tens of thousands of pounds.
If you successfully generate lots of high-quality and relevant traffic for your website, then it’s money wasted if your website provides a terrible user experience (UX).
For example, if you ignore UX – a user may click on one of your Google Ads, then go to your website homepage, which takes 10 seconds to load. The page is not relevant to the ad, and the navigation has dozens of options, so it’s unclear where the user should click to get to the desired page. There is no live chat, so the user leaves and goes directly to a competitor’s website. Not only that, the poor UX has created a negative impression of your brand.
Many factors contribute to website UX; these include:
– Page speed/load time
– Simple navigation
– Specific landing pages
– Imagery
– Typography
– Accessibility
Once you have the fundamentals of UX nailed, it’s time to look at conversion rate optimisation (CRO). While UX looks at giving the user a great experience, CRO looks at doing everything possible to convert users into customers; without damaging UX.
There is a considerable overlap between UX and CRO. For example, page speed is crucial for both. It is worth noting that page speed is also a Google ranking factor and that users will give you around 2.5 seconds for your site to load; before they hit the back button, go back to Google and choose a competitors website.
Smooth and easy to use navigation is also vital for both UX and CRO, as is a planned-out conversion funnel or path. However, one significant factor when it comes to CRO is trust – does your website inspire confidence in the user?
It is possible to build trust with “social proof” – i.e., reviews and testimonials. Other trust signals are also important, including icons and badges that represent awards and memberships.
Live chat can also help inspire trust and confidence. Fully managed live chat with UK-based live chat agents can help build trust and rapport with visitors. Unlike email and telephone, fully managed live chat can improve both UX and CRO by providing immediate answers to a visitor’s questions.
Fully managed live chat is also a great source of information for informing webpage design. For example, if several users ask a live chat agent where to find a particular product regularly, then the navigation or the links to that product may need to be reviewed.
For testing and monitoring both UX and CRO, it is best to use tracking software such as Google Analytics and Google Optimise so that you can test changes on the design, copy, and imagery to see which tweaks improve metrics and which do not.
According to several reports, over 40% of visitors will expect live chat on your business website, and around 50% of people will expect this feature on an eCommerce site.
The vast majority of internet users have one thing in common – they are inpatient! Many online shoppers, for example, want to quickly find what they are looking for and then get back to whatever it is they were doing. They do not want to spend time browsing or reading information about different products. Many people are in the middle of something – for example, their lunch at work, and want to quickly buy something or submit an enquiry and get back to their day.
With this in mind, website speed is a crucial factor in terms of customer experience, but live chat can also make the difference between a good and bad customer service experience. Fully managed live chat has an advantage over email and phone because it is the fastest customer service channel. People are generally in a hurry and want to get everything done in one single visit to your website. They don’t want to have to wait hours or days for a response to their email, especially when it relates to a simple question, such as finding a specific product on your website.
Outsourcing to a fully managed live chat service such as Moneypenny’s can positively impact UX and CRO, and in turn, it can have a positive effect on your brand. While business owners and marketing consultants may think of a brand as a single entity, in reality, each individual who is aware of your brand has a slightly different perception of it. Whether through personal interpretation, different brand touchpoints, or an interaction with your brand, everyone will see your company in a somewhat different light and from a different perspective.
Many marketing experts segment branding into three stages:
The pre-purchase stage of branding relates to the advertising and marketing campaigns that aim to drive visitors to purchase from your company. The purchase stage refers to the process and experience of buying or signing up for your product or service. The post-purchase stage is your after-sales customer service, loyalty schemes, etc.
One of Steve Jobs’ strokes of marketing genius was to take money from pre-purchase advertising and put it into the purchase experience. Apple opened a large number of beautifully designed retail stores in major cities such a New York. The stores provided a great user and shopping experience and showcased the brand. It not only helped to establish Apple as a premium tech company, in 2017, retail stores reportedly contributed nearly one-third of Apple’s $229.2 billion in net sales. All this, despite the consensus that the “high street is dead.”
While we are not suggesting that you go and invest millions in high street retail, we do think that fully managed live chat can provide a tremendous purchase-stage branding strategy for businesses of all sizes.
Human-managed live chat can help build rapport with visitors and build a human-to-human connection that makes the visitor feel valued and important. Compared to no live chat or a chatbot that has no human to take over should your questions not be answered – a website with fully human-managed live chat to relieve many of the potential frustrations that come with using a given website. In turn, this can improve a visitor’s perception of your brand.
Fully managed live chat is also a fantastic medium for customer service after a purchase has been made. From a business’s perspective, it can dramatically cut down on emails, phone calls, and customer service tickets. From a customer’s perspective, live chat is the perfect platform for immediate answers and resolutions to any problems that they may have. This, in turn, helps to mitigate any potential damage to your brand that may come with a poor post-purchase experience. If, for example, a customer cannot find answers to their problem or are stuck on hold when trying to call customer service – they are unlikely to have a favourable view of your business or brand.
Generate leads & sales while you sleep! According to Econsultancy, live chat has the highest customer satisfaction levels of any customer service channel. However, if live chat is not available when you visit a specific website, then there is no live chat as far as that visitor is concerned!
Our data shows that 37% of people prefer to contact businesses outside of regular working hours.
If you want to gain a competitive advantage and create a great customer experience, then providing live chat around-the-clock can help. With more people working shifts and many people too busy during the day to get in touch with a business, providing a point of contact late into the evenings can help customers feel like they are taken care of and valued.
Live chat provides great ways to make your website more interactive and engaging. However, there is a distinct difference between a fully managed live chat with human agents based locally and chatbots that use either artificial intelligence or decision tree programming.
With human live chat agents, you can include their picture in the chat window itself. From there, the live chat agent can build rapport, show empathy, and have their own personality that creates warmth and connection. When using chatbots, it’s arguably unethical not to disclose the fact that users are talking to a bot – although many of them will be able to tell anyway. While talking to a bot can be a great idea when the website is busy, and live chat agents are already taking on multiple conversions, they do not provide the same customer experience. They do not make customers or visitors feel valued and appreciated – a visitor will not feel like any effort is being invested into them if an automated bot greets them and answers their queries incorrectly. While some customers will want questions answered, many more will enjoy a human interaction with your brand.
Unlike many of our competitors, our clients benefit from having real people based in the UK to support them. This has many advantages as it is much easier for UK live chat agents and operators to build rapport with UK visitors and customers.
Not only that, but with a dedicated live chat agent, or team of agents, as a customer, you can contact your agent(s) and Account Manager with any queries. The fact that all of our teams are based in the UK makes communication much more straightforward.
With Moneypenny, you can customise your Live Chat window to fit your business and website’s branding and colour scheme. You can also customise your chat window to pop up proactively on specific pages after a set amount of time.
For example, if you run an eCommerce store, drop-offs are notoriously high during the checkout process. Using Live Chat to proactively popup on checkout pages only after a set amount of time – can help increase sales and conversion rate dramatically.
At Moneypenny, we match you with a dedicated Moneypenny Receptionist based on their experience in a given industry. You can then brief them on your business and how you would like chats handled, and the specific goals for live chat on your website.
In addition, as a client of Moneypenny’s Live Chat service, you’ll receive 24/7 support team from our tech team, should you need them. With the option to integrate programmable chatbots with agents and with a online reporting portal where you can contact your Account Manager, agent and monitor performance, you’re in safe hands with Moneypenny.
To learn more about our fully managed Live Chat service, click here.
12 Feb 2024
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