3 Secrets to Effective Customer Engagement
By Alex Bloom, President, Velaro
Shorter wait times, a boost in sales, a drop in operational costs. These are some of the most common goals for a live chat program.
However, in its most basic terms, live chat is also an opportunity to establish a personal connection with your customer.
Although its impact may be difficult to quantify, customer engagement is a key component of establishing trust, converting a customer, and ultimately cultivating brand loyalty.
How can you kindle that personal connection so it has a lasting effect long after the chat window has closed? Here are five tools for increasing engagement during live chat sessions.
Social Integration and Surveys
Critical to conducting an engaging live chat session is the ability to create meaningful conversation with your customer. But when it comes to chat, there is also an expectation for speed. How can you gain insights about a user and their problem without a time-consuming back-and-forth exchange?
Integrating your live chat software with your company’s social media channels allows you to automatically pull in your customers’ available social data. This not only aids your agents in conducting research and tailoring their service but also saves the user time, as login and identity data are auto-populated from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. As a supplement or alternative, many companies provide a brief pre-chat survey for customers to fill in identifying information and to categorize their issue, so they can be served as quickly and effectively as possible.
Proactive Chat
Used strategically, proactive chat is another effective way to thoughtfully engage with customers. Armed with your platform’s rules-engine triggers and insights on visitor behavior, you can craft messages that are opportunely timed as well as compelling. For example, you gain the ability to reach out to a user who has spent an inordinate amount of time on a complex product webpage, as you would a customer meandering around your store with a perplexed expression.
Worried that your customers don’t want to be bothered? Think again. Research has shown that proactive chatters are actually six times more likely to buy than an average website visitor.
File Transferring and Push Pages
While live chat is an excellent medium for real-time troubleshooting and product detailing, there will inevitably be instances when reference material or leave-behind resources are necessary and useful.
Look into activating your live chat software’s file transfer feature so that screenshots, troubleshooting guides and product catalogs can all be securely shared without interrupting your session. Or, if you would like to walk a customer through a page on your website, use the push page feature to present a direct link to the user in the live chat window. By using these tools wisely, you can ensure that customers have the resources they need during the chat session and beyond.
_____________
For additional articles on our site, please click here