The most important factor in any business is the customer. Without customers, your wholesale business cannot move to profitable heights. When you do already have customers, you need to work hard to keep them and get even more. You do this by offering them customer care support 24/7, provide phone call services and email addresses for them to contact you and give them a platform to leave feedback, comments, service reviews, or product reviews.
Great customer service gets you more referrals because customers will spread the word about you, thus helping to grow your audience and your customer base. There is one great way that you can provide excellent service to your customers as well: through website live chat.
Website live chat is a platform that lets your customer care team talk with visitors or customers on your website, and in real time. All that is needed is an internet connection (which they already have, or they wouldn’t be on your site), and you can initiate a chat with them. Most websites place the chat box at the bottom right of their web pages, and once a visitor opens the page, the chat box or icon pops up, showing the customer that someone is available to chat with them.
Why Small and Large Online Businesses Invest in Live Chat
Many eCommerce websites (as a wholesale business, you ought to have one), have now added live chat support to their customer help desk, so as to provide answers to visitors in real time, rather than have the customers wait for hours to able to reach them via phone calls, or send emails and wait for replies from your customer care.
With live chat (real-time chatting), customer care personnel are able to build customers’ trust and confidence as they shop on the website, and the service also improves your conversion rates. Statistics show that more people prefer to chat live with a customer care rep, rather than interacting through email; and a high percentage are more likely to return to your website, if it has a live chat service, to make more purchases.
Live chat software increases the personal interaction factor of customer service, allowing you to assign your customer reps effectively to attend to the customers’ needs in real time. Having live chat software on your customer care help desk is very beneficial to your wholesale business, and more and more businesses are using live chat now, no matter what their sizes are.
Reasons Why Live Chat Is Great For Your Wholesale Business
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It Is Convenient For The Customers
There are typically two types of customers who need help with shopping on your eCommerce website. These are the potential/first-time customers, and your current, existing customers. The potential customers, or the first-timers, may chat up your customer reps to find out information on some product descriptions or specifications, or because they cannot find a certain item advertised on your website, or because they want to compare products and services, hoping that you will give them the information necessary to help them make a decision. The current or existing customers will want to know the status of the order they have placed, or to get information on return policies of your business, or to provide feedback to you, suggesting customer care improvements. Live chat makes it convenient for customers to get in touch with you about pressing issues, and also to give you much-needed feedback about your services.
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It Is Cost Effective
Live chat software is very easy to set up and use. Some live chat services provide you with live chat platforms that contain a bunch of integrations that are widely used on content management systems (CMS), and several eCommerce systems, so that you don’t even need coding skills to set up the live chat on your website. Live chat lessens the cost that you would incur by running a call center, reducing the long waiting times for customers, because live chat allows live chat personnel to handle multiple chats at once. This eliminates the need to hire more personnel, also reducing the cost for you. Because customers get real-time advice via live chat, they minimize the need to return purchases and increases average order value, which means more profit for you.
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It Keeps You On The Level With The Competition
Both big and small businesses are getting live chat services for their websites because they see and know the value of live chat for their business. Having a website live chat service on your eCommerce site means you on the level with competing businesses and help you grow your customer base and your conversion rates.
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It Increases Your Sales And Conversions
Using live chat to talk with your customers builds up their confidence in the choices they make, positively affecting their purchases. A great live chat experience is directly linked to a higher order value, which means that the better the live chat experience, the more they purchase from you. This can be achieved by properly training and equipping your live chat personnel. Provide them with knowledge in the products and services so that they can upsell or provide more information to the customers so that they can get the perfect fit for them. Give discount coupons to ensure customers to persuade them to make a purchase. In this way, you can increase conversion rates and sales, all by using website live chat.
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It Improves Customer Loyalty
With website live chat, the customers are certain that they are talking and interacting with human beings, and not robots. It also shows them that you have the time to spend to talk with them, help them navigate your site and answer whatever questions they may have. This good service improves customer loyalty, and loyal customers tend to pay more and make more purchases.
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It Expands Your Market Reach
With live chat, you can expand your reach to other parts of the world, getting customers in areas way out of locality and region. This means that you will have more customers, more sales, more impressions, and more conversion rates.
