How to please customers while still gain sales?

[tracy14]

While I have more and more potential customers through SEO, PPC, Ads, social media and other channel, how to raise conversion rate is the biggest bomb in my mind. From all my limited experience, live chat is a great tool to support my business, please customers with much lower cost. 
We all know that nobody likes to wait for long queues, it will make customers lose patience and sometimes they just give up conversation even my website. But when I apply live chat on my website, customers don’t need to spend time waiting for mail reply or getting a call on hold. And now live chat also provides API to connect FB and other social media, it does save me a lot time when I can receive messages in live chat and reply these messages.
And yes this is business, I want not only to please the customers but also I want to gain revenues. Live chat helps me have increase in sales, and I can tell from the monthly sales which match the report in live chat conversation. And on the other hand, the package fee for Nemo chat is a little expensive to me, so I had a hard time with low cash flow on my end. But from a long-term perspective, my agent and I can talk to more customers every day, deal with more support case, so I think it will benefit eventually.

[Harold Mansfield]

Not a fan of chat on most websites. It makes sense in some, but most times it's out of place, limited, and I'd rather be able to talk to a person.

I'm currently in or setting up 2 different support scenarios. One internally for what will probably be hundreds of people and one that is occasional customer support.
For the larger internal scenario I will use something like Jira Service Desk.

For the customer service, I prefer answering the phone and those clients prefer speaking to a person.

For sales, I'll close more sales and get the deposit quickly by speaking to people directly than any chat system.
And what about older people who don't want to type everything? Or people on mobile devices who don't feel like all that work to communicate with a business?

Also, if it's not open 24/7 it really stands out as impersonal and makes a company look small. If you have dedicated office hours, you should be able to answer the phone during those hours.

JMO of course.

[tracy14]

Hi Harold, thanks for your sharing. I have to be honest, I have the same concern as you did at the beginning. Just from my own experience with speaking to agent, I will need to have a little more private room cause I don't want to share my conversations with others. And in some case if you need to provide order#/tracking# or other info to agents to help you, live chat is more convenient like just send agents a capture or copy paste. And ppl on mobile phone can still chat on phone web or through SDK (provided by Nemochat, not sure others).
The other thing about call center, the cost is too high, agent can't do multi-tasking, and for me now, I can only afford 3 agents, if they all communicate with customers by phone, the queue would be so long that you might just give up.
And yes I understand some older ppl would rather not type or have trouble typing, this is common, I will provide a phone number listing but not recommend it, after all live chat is more easy and quick for most ppl.

[Fulcrum]

How many sales are you losing that can be tied directly to a lack of live chat?

You're probably better off trying to figure out where your "lost sales" are getting lost and correcting the problem at the source.

[Suman Verma]

If you sell or promote physical products on your website, then a live chat option, or a way to get in touch with you would help with increasing sales. Adding a little bit to the sale, maybe a random 5% discount if you can, or a small freebie, can help increase sales. You can also use coupon feature, discount offers, Q/A quiz and winning prize, some membership chain to get sales.

[Harold Mansfield]

Hi Harold, thanks for your sharing. I have to be honest, I have the same concern as you did at the beginning. Just from my own experience with speaking to agent, I will need to have a little more private room cause I don't want to share my conversations with others. And in some case if you need to provide order#/tracking# or other info to agents to help you, live chat is more convenient like just send agents a capture or copy paste. And ppl on mobile phone can still chat on phone web or through SDK (provided by Nemochat, not sure others).
The other thing about call center, the cost is too high, agent can't do multi-tasking, and for me now, I can only afford 3 agents, if they all communicate with customers by phone, the queue would be so long that you might just give up.
And yes I understand some older ppl would rather not type or have trouble typing, this is common, I will provide a phone number listing but not recommend it, after all live chat is more easy and quick for most ppl.


What you are describing sounds a little bigger than what I was envisioning, so I have to adjust my response.

If you have that many agents or are fielding that many requests I can see how chat could make sense.
In that kind of situation I'm happy to use chat to get support quickly.

I also get good support on Twitter. Many times I've called a company out on Twitter for poor service and they've reached out and helped with the problem.

[tracy14]

Hum? I don't remember I mentioned losing sales.

[tracy14]

What you are describing sounds a little bigger than what I was envisioning, so I have to adjust my response.

If you have that many agents or are fielding that many requests I can see how chat could make sense.
In that kind of situation I'm happy to use chat to get support quickly.

I also get good support on Twitter. Many times I've called a company out on Twitter for poor service and they've reached out and helped with the problem.

Yes, I find they are so fast on Twitter, is it because all others can see my twitter so they will need to handle it fast to prevent further trouble?

[Suman Verma]

If you sell or promote physical products on your website, then a live chat option or a way to get in touch with you would help with increasing sales.

Adding a little bit to the sale, maybe a random 5% discount if you can, or a small freebie can help increase sales.

Hope that helps. All the best!

[KellyMillerss]

I'll bring more deals to a close and get the store rapidly by addressing individuals specifically than any talk framework.


Furthermore, shouldn't something be said about more seasoned individuals who would prefer not to type everything? Or then again individuals on cell phones who don't feel like all that work to speak with a business