Live chat software can have numerous applications for a litany of business types. The good ones generally work over most major platforms and are easy enough to use that your employees can quickly help people better understand what your business has to offer. Since the industry is so varied and different uses value different aspects of live chat software, we reached out to the small business community to ask what services they relied on and what drove them to make that choice.
One of the biggest reasons for small businesses to fold live chat functionality into their website is the ability to quickly and easily respond to customers. That kind of immediacy can not only make things easier for your customers but could also help push a prospective buyer to commit to a decision. To that end, Eimantas Aukstikalnis, the owner and manager of NordFur, said his company relies on Zendesk’s chat functionality on their site.
“I think Zendesk helps a lot when it comes to quick questions from my customers that are important for them, but not important enough to write and send an email or make a phone call,” he said. “When I compare questions my customers ask via email and questions I receive on live chat, I see a pattern that people on live chat tend to ask very simple questions about the product they are about to buy like ‘What is the color of the lining?” or ‘Can I wear it in summer?” Instant customer support allows a customer to make a buying decision right away.”
Another consideration our community experts said they looked for was a long list of software integrations. Today’s small business owner relies on a bevy of software solutions to handle much of their day-to-day needs, so any opportunity to combine functions is generally regarded as a plus. Jakub Kliszczak, a marketing specialist at Channels, said the company relies on LiveChat for its integrations that help streamline the customer service process.
“LiveChat comes with a bunch of integrations that we utilize daily, and it even integrates directly with our software,” he said. “Thanks to [those integrations], we can get better results no matter if our customers want to contact us via live chat or the phone.”
Finally, in some instances, people chose a service’s live chat feature because they were already invested in its overarching ecosystem. There are multiple instances where companies offer an omnichannel approach to customer communications, leading to instances where live chat will be just one aspect of an overall portfolio of options. Ringblaze co-founder and CEO Dennis Vu said his company relies on Freshworks’ Freshchat solution because they were already using the rest of the suite.
“Freshchat works beautifully when combined with the other tools in the Freshworks suite,” he said. “When a new customer comes in through the chat box, we can plug them into the Freshworks CRM so we immediately have their records. Moreover, we can connect their query to Freshdesk so that our customer support team has an overview of their issue and the ticket that is created in our system.”