3 Benefits of Having a Live Chat on Your Website

With new technological features emerging almost daily, customers’ expectations are increasing. To win a potential customer and retain the existing one, companies need to be available at the right channels. 

The usage of live chat for customer service purposes is not new. Still, many companies are ignoring the feature or not reaching its full potential. If you need convincing that live chat is worth your attention, here are a few numbers (via liveagent.com):

• 63% of Millennials prefer to have their questions answered via a live chat rather than traditional channels.
• 36% of Gen Zers would use live chat to deal with their customer service query. Similarly, new methods such as reaching customer service via WhatsApp are popular among this age group.
• 61% of customers under the age of 24 admit to avoiding making phone calls and prefer making use of a chatting function.
• While younger generations are undoubtedly the main target group for this feature, also 45% of customers over the age of 55 indicate that they had used the live chat service at least once – and this number keeps growing.
• 41% of customers expect a live chat feature on your website.

Benefits of Live Chat

If you are not yet convinced that the live chat feature is worth looking into, let us highlight just a few of the many benefits associated with the service.

1. Influencing the sales decisions

Thanks to the timely reactions and personal approach of the live chat agents, you can guide your customers through the buying journey, engage them and ultimately shorten the sales cycle. Live chat can increase your conversion rate by up to 20%. Next to that, 63% of customers are also more likely to return to a website if they have the chance to talk to a sales representative via a live chat.

2. Accessibility

There is a whole range of reasons why the live chat feature is an accessible way of doing customer service. Firstly, the popup window is easy to spot and does not require customers to look for your contact page. Secondly, it is possible to live translate messages and therefore get rid of a possible language barrier, which could cause issues over the phone. Thirdly, while waiting for your agent’s response, consumers can continue working on other things, which makes it a convenient option.

3. Easy and inexpensive

With many live chat solutions providers on the market, all you have to do is choose. Based on your needs, even a free solution might be enough. Furthermore, considering that having a live chat will likely cut from the number of phone calls your customer service agents receive. Therefore, you will end up saving costs in more than one place. Unlike with a phone call, agents can also often juggle more chats at the same time.

Experience Iceat Livechat

The LiveChat on the Icecat website brings logged-in users the opportunity to ask any questions. On working days from 9:00 till 17:30, an Icecat employee directly answers their questions, instead of a bot. Outside working hours, users can still ask questions that are being transformed into an e-mail and sent to the responsible country manager. The personal touch helps the average rating of the chat from users. Out of the chats that were evaluated by users in H1-21, 67% were rated positively. Looking at the total number of chats for H1-2021, we see a rise of 15% compared to the same period last year. This also shows that the demand for product content is rising, and therefore the number of chats as well.

Icecat tip: Are you worried about receiving spam messages? Limit the live chat feature only to the environment for logged-in users and be available to assist your paying customers.

Katerina Kadlecova

Online Marketer at Icecat N.V.