Today, in this real-time communication era, live chat and video conference has changed the way companies do business. Most of our activities are integrated with this fast changing means of communication. The use of live-chat is not only affecting B2C based companies, but also their B2B counterparts. Interestingly, this stereotypical B2C technology can be employed as a good marketing tool, increasing sales and customer satisfaction.
Key Reasons Why Live Chat is Suitable for B2B
B2B ecommerce can benefit greatly by leveraging live chat into their business process. According to Forrester Consulting and American Marketing Association, Live-chat can increase the ROI (return of investment) by up to 305%, as well as raise the conversion rate by up to 20%. Rachel Rodenborg also mentioned that there are, generally, three key reasons why you should consider implementing this technology:
- Increasing your business’ conversion rate. Live chat enables companies to answer customers’ inquiries faster and can remove buying objections, resulting in consumers having a greater level of trust towards the brand.
- Increasing sales: customers are three times more likely to buy your product or use your service if they are engaged via live chat. This is because nowadays people are more inclined towards direct and personal interactions, rather than one-way communications.
- Better engagement with customers: as we mentioned at point 2 above, better engagement means better sales. This is because more interaction with your customers generally results in greater customer satisfaction with your brand. As a result, customers will be less likely to walk away from the sales process.
Also read: Enhancing Supplier Platform’s Performance Through Chat Feature Presence
Moreover, according to the AberdeenGroup study, live chat produces more compelling interactions between companies and their customers, which at the end of the day will result in a better overall performance.
What You Should Do to Maximize The Benefits of Live Chat
Peter Ostrow, from AberdeenGroup said that there are four main things you should note that form what best-in-class companies do when they integrate live chat system into their business process. These are:
- The security: the first thing you have to consider before developing a live chat is the implementation of safety measures regarding both your company’s and the customers’ data. Peter said that the majority of companies (two-third of the best-in-class) are able to guarantee that their customers’ data won’t be released by any means, let alone distributed beyond the conversation at hand.
- Provision of expert support: those two-thirds best-in-class companies are much more likely to offer expert support for any subject matter in the live chat environment. Most of the time, the question will be escalated to a more detailed or complicated one. Thus, to maintain best interactions, expertise in subject matter is a must.
- Modify your live chat service to enable various features. Other than security and quality of the answers, the next important thing is to enhance your live chat system to be able to do various things. Such as click-to-call, screen sharing solutions, co-browsing modalities, and many others. Those additional features will greatly help the agent to conduct the interaction in a more fluent and interesting way. For instance, by utilizing various rich media tools, such as screen-sharing or instant meeting, you can produce a seamless customer experience. Besides, the ability to manage diverse content assets can help the agent to adjust to what customers need.
- Integration into CRM system. This system will ensure the efficiency of your customer-facing personnel, eading them to understand the behavior of the accounts they interact with. In fact, half of best-in-class companies, are integrated with CRM system.
The opportunities afforded by live chat when used in the e-commerce industry are obvious. However, it is not impossible for other B2B sectors to improve as live chat can also help throughout customer cycles, providing a seamless experience to the overall business process.
