We all know that the core aim for any successful business is to provide extraordinary customer service. Much like a traditional retail experience, sales representatives tuning into your prerequisites and proposing the right products significantly influence your purchasing behaviour, the same way a chat widget on your website can boost confidence and conversion. You’re providing real time customer service to your website visitors before they turn into your actual customers, while gaining a competitive edge.
Chats can affect customer purchase decisions based entirely on the psychology that someone is available to guide them through the purchasing decision and giving them that undivided attention they demand. Indeed, 44% of customers bought a product online in light of their current chat session, while 62% of them were prepared to buy from the same website once more.
In case you’re thinking about making use of a chat feature for your website, this checklist for can help you provide successful chat support.
Chat window pop-ups
Going by industry trends, most businesses have chat window pop-ups on their websites. Why? Its mainly to initiate a conversation that can eventually lead to a conversion. Pop ups are 13 times more powerful at producing clicks and opt-in subscribers than standard website banners. Having said that, a chat window that pops up as soon as your website visitor browses your website is something you should definitely avoid for chances of distracting them.
Automated chat window pop-ups can stimulate conversations with visitors who have less time to browse through your website’s entire content. A chat window that pops up right at that moment is like the icing on the cake. However, make sure the chat window pops up only after the visitor has spent some time on your website, perhaps around 10-15 seconds. Moreover, initiating a chat pop-up when your customer exits a particular page is a good tactic to re-engage with them.
CRM Integration
The race for obtaining customer data is a longstanding challenge for marketers. The more data you have about your customer, the more you can personalise your marketing communications, normally leading to a higher chance of doing business with them. A CRM framework that accumulates and stores data of your customers is an absolute necessity for the modern marketer. Therefore, the integration of your website chat with your CRM is vital.
Why integrate your CRM with chat? All things considered, you want your agents to access customer information so that the next time the customer revisits your website, your agents have a more personalised conversation with them. You’re going to have a lot more information available at your fingertips to convert a website visitor to a potential customer with the knowledge of their social profiles, email addresses, date and time of chat, phone numbers, IP location and, of course, their name. Besides you’re saving time on manually entering leads into your database and making it easier for yourself to collect data about their previous enquiries, purchase history and other account information.
Availability of chat transcripts
Chat transcripts record the conversations you had with your website visitors. More often than not, when customers don’t find (or get confused by) information on the website they’ll turn to chat, seeking help. Although your chat agents are well acquainted with frequent customer queries, the option for the website visitor to download a transcript should be available so there’s less chance of them missing the valuable information they just gathered.
What’s in it for you? Since the transcript stores conversation history, you can work on your sales responses and introduce new ways to better handle website visitors and requests. Moreover, potential customers can find the information they are looking for on the FAQ page of your website as the FAQ database builds stronger leaving other enquiries to be handled by the chat agents. Besides, a disparity between a customer and agent regarding a discount guaranteed can be frustrating. Instead of playing the blame game, the chat transcript can help you sift through conversations and get to the depth of it.
Multi-lingual with attractive images
Hotels spend a lot of time publishing high resolution images of their property on their websites and social channels. Alluring pictures and videos grab a visitor’s attention, the engagement rate rises as the brain is much more adept at processing images and videos rather than text. Likewise, a multi-lingual chat feature on your website allows you to chat with anyone and everyone from around the world without facing any language barrier.
If you’re enabling a chat widget, make sure your chat supports images, videos and multiple languages. The multi-lingual element will not only make you available in every language but also help you better engage with customers. Generally, the hotel industry has clientele from different walks of life and in the same way that you hire and train front desk staff to speak different languages, your chat should offer that same level of service.
Replace live chat with chatbot
There’s so much buzz about chatbots and the vast opportunities they provide to businesses. The hotel industry and digital marketing are ever changing, keeping you on your toes at all times. Your hotel’s website drives a lot of organic traffic and this is your chance to make or break it. A live chat that shows you as unavailable is a big ‘no no’. Opt for a chatbot instead. But why get a chatbot for your hotel?
Chatbots provide 24×7 automated responses without involving humans to respond to website visitors. Besides, they are built on messaging applications making you available on every platform that the vast majority of your potential customers are on. They engage with customers better with a light hearted tone and personalised greeting. Moreover, 53% of customers are more likely to purchase from a business that they can contact via a chat application.
Many businesses have started building bots for enterprises who want to enter this era of automation. Trilyo bot seamlessly integrates with your existing CRM with features of multi-linguality and many must have live chat components.
Acting just like your hotel’s virtual employee, chatbots can handle multiple chats at a given instance, be it for customer queries, reservations, concierge services or just fostering relationships to build loyalty. Moreover, you’re reducing human errors and saving a ton of both time and money, quite literally by not appointing live chat agents. Besides, chatbots never forget and the chat history is readily available for you to look back on whenever the need arises.
