Is your enterprise business cashing on in live chat?

There are no diminutives in enterprise businesses: with multiple levels, locations, divisions, and departments comes a large customer base, followed up by huge challenges and prohibitive costs. Luckily, enterprise leaders are usually just as immensely bold and big on efficient solutions. Hence the development of business chat software, the latest addition to their digital toolkits.

Here’s why live chat is a heaven-sent opportunity for enterprises, and why so many already use it.

Live Chat: The Story and Benefits

Live chat tools are so much more than instant messengers. Essentially developed for customer support, these convenient softwares now plays a significant part in lead generation and sales too, thanks to their enhanced approach to customer data collection and analysis.

While live chats are critical when it comes to fighting bounce rates and shopping cart abandonment, even the customers love them! In comparison to other means of communication, 92% of them prefer chatting with an operator in real-time. And why wouldn’t they? After all, live chat solutions not only provide a personalized, faster, and richer experience, they are actually way more effective when it comes to delivering purchasing guidance and post-purchase solutions.

Since favored by most customers, live chats guarantee an increase in sales, customer retention, and overall ROI. They are a great differentiating point for any business and niche, given the considerable competitive edge that they assure. Finally — and this will delight you the most — live chats are generous money savers.

Enterprise Live Chat

Though satisfied customers are the ultimate goal of every business, enterprises often have a harder time reaching it. With every facet operating on a large scale, both sales and customer support need fast and reliable solutions to accommodate the needs of each and every individual. Apart from that, and especially since enterprise businesses have a lot of people on the payroll, these solutions need to be fairly cheap as well.

That’s where live chat tools come into play.

1. It is Cost-Effective

With most live chat vendors, pricing plans for enterprise businesses are quite affordable. They support an unlimited number of operators for a monthly fee, while packages usually include everything from pre-written responses and chat transcripts to real-time visitor monitoring and chat window customization.

But, what’s even more important is that a single live chat tool can curtail the overall operational costs for a substantial amount. Employing this solution means getting rid of the phone bill, promises lower hiring costs, and implies greater efficiency on a department-wide level.

No Phone Bills

If you’re aiming for exceptional phone support, you simply cannot avoid toll-free numbers. Though they are so expensive that finding a cheaper solution isn’t so hard, live chats have another advantage: they allow operators to handle multiple customers simultaneously, all in real-time.

What this means is that wait and hold times are reduced to a minimum and so are after-purchase call-backs. A phone operator might need an entire hour to come up with a helpful solution, while a good live chat operator can do it with a few clicks, multitasking between customers throughout the process.

Lower Hiring Costs

Live chat software is a brilliant outsourcing tool. Since there’s no need for all of your operators to be at the same place, you can downsize costs by letting them work remotely, or by hiring at-need freelance workers. Not only are their wages lower, but they also open an opportunity for delivering worldwide, 24/7 customer service across all devices and time zones.

Increased Efficiency

The faster your operators work, the less of your money is spent. But also, the more your business gets to earn. Customers and entrepreneurs are not the only ones who love live chats — they are a favorite of salespeople and customer reps as well, simply because they are more intuitive and easier to use.

And, it’s not all due to multitasking. Usually connected to a company’s data center or an internal knowledge base, live chats guarantee faster search and more actionable solutions. Instead of having to spell out multi-stepped procedures over a phone, operators can simply copy a link and press send.

2. It is Scalable

Another thing that enterprises have to deal with is scalability. On some occasions, these businesses need to handle up to 200 live chat users at the same time, while on others these numbers can rapidly decline to as low as 50 users. However predictable these upsurges and downturns maybe, an enterprise has to be equipped with a software tool reliable and scalable enough to manage them all.

Undoubtedly, enterprise live chats meet both of these requirements as well. It’s already been said that a productive operator can respond to and chat with up to a dozen of customers at the same time, but that’s not all. Enterprise pricing plans are mostly created with scalability in mind, which means that you can additionally hire as many operators as you need — without spending extra on the software costs.

3. It is Perfect for High-Demand Customer Service Environments

When customer service needs to be fast-paced, but deliver the same high-quality results as in businesses with far fewer customers, live chat is the perfect solution. Despite the obvious multitasking advantage, these tools offer a number of additional features, all equally intuitive, functional, and easy to use. Together, they make a powerhouse for productive customer interactions.

Chat Routing & Queue Times

Pay attention to chat routing, since it may save both you and the customers a significant amount of time. When the day is extremely busy (and days in enterprise customer service usually are), this feature allows operators to relay chats to their colleagues, avoiding both the workload that will eventually lead to burnout and the wait times that the customers hate. And, if these are still unavoidable, a website visitor will receive an approximate wait time info from the queueing feature.

Canned Responses & File Transfers

Canned responses are another feature that conveniently reduces the resolution time to the bare minimum. Similar to pre-written scripts, they can be reused in multiple chat sessions, but unlike them, canned responses are created by operators themselves.

When it comes to frequently asked questions, this feature is a customer service rep’s go-to solution. Additionally, operators can send files: a guide, a knowledge base article, or a website link that immediately solves a customer’s problem, rather than having to explain and repeat everything over a phone.

Proactive Chat & Smart Triggers

With so many prospects waiting in conversion lines, and such a great amount of existing customers expecting to be heard, enterprises cannot afford to settle for a basic package. Of course, those created for large companies are all-inclusive and come with cutting-edge features like proactive chat and smart triggers.

While the first targets indecisive website visitors, alerts operators who they are, and lets them initiate a live chat session even before the visitor approaches them with a problem, the latter notifies operators that a certain visitor has returned back to the site.

Visitor Tracking & Analytics

If an enterprise decides to make an investment, it shouldn’t be anything less than worthwhile, right? That’s why live chat tools aren’t just meant for chatting, but powerful visitor trackers and customer data collectors as well.

These features can help you gain a deeper insight into visitor behavior and make sense of the large volume of data you need to process, which is something a large-scale business with plenty of different customers can certainly make use of.

Chat Rating & Operator Monitoring

Even though enterprise leaders surely have a lot on their plates, an exceptional customer experience shouldn’t be neglected at any cost. In fact, it is the single most important differentiating point in such a ruthless profit-chasing game.

So, on one side, enterprises have to offer consistent and pleasurable customer support, while on the other, they are challenged by a great number of operators, all of which have to be motivated and monitored individually. That’s where chat rating and operator monitoring come in handy — both in their own right, these features give you precise insight into your employees’ performance.

Additionally, you can even look into enterprise Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) solutions

Summing up

In order to stay competitive, enterprise businesses need solutions that are reliable, fast, effective, and inexpensive. Live chat software are certainly one of those. So choose the right live chat solution for your enterprise and start monitoring the difference.

This is a guest post from Jason, associated with ProProfs Chat.