Nearly 70% of consumers expect live chat support and it’s currently the preferred channel for consumers between 18-49 years old1. Over the last few years, live chat has emerged as a must have customer communication channel for sales and support.
To help companies meet customers on their preferred channels, we’ve launched a new, highly customizable chat widget which can be easily deployed. The Netomi chat widget allows companies to use Netomi’s powerful chatbots for customer service to provide immediate resolutions to over 80% of routine questions in seconds. This immediate support increases customer satisfaction, decreases resolution time and deflects tickets from more costly channels.
Discover the key questions to ask when scheduling a chatbot demo.
Live Chat Statistics: Why offering live chat is critical
Live chat as we know it today emerged in 1998 as an alternative to phone and email support2. The benefits of live chat are vast: convenient, immediate, synchronous support. It eliminates hold times associated with phone support, and responses from email tickets.
Just how popular is live chat today? Consider these live chat statistics:
- Live chat is what people expect and meets the expectations of customers
- More than 41% of customers expect a live chat window on your website3
- 51% of customers want businesses to be available 24/74
- More than half of all customers prefer to chat with someone in real-time and online, rather than call a company for support5
- 79% of customers say they prefer to chat with agents purely because of the immediacy it offers compared to other channels6
- Live chat is what the kids are doing
- 63% of millennials prefer to have their basic customer support queries answered via a live chat widget vs. traditional channels7
- 61% of customers under 24 admit that they purposely avoid calling companies, and 60% of millennials prefer live chat to traditional media8
- Live chat can drive repeat business and unlock revenue
- There is a 10% increase in the average order value from customers who engage in a chat before making a purchase, than those who do not use chat5
- 63% of customers agree that they are more likely to return to a site if they have the possibility of talking to a representative via live chat9
- 79% of companies report that the presence of live chat has positively impacted their sales, revenues, and customer relations1
- Companies that use live chat see there was a 3.84% increase in conversion rates, with a 6% overall lift in revenue5
- Your competitors are using live chat
- By 2022, about 85% of businesses are expected to opt for live chat support1
- Live chat is expected to continue to grow by as much as 87% in the next 12-18 months5
Learn more about companies using chatbots for customer service.
The benefits of Netomi’s chat widget
The newly launched Netomi chat widget offers companies many benefits, including:
- Full customization: The chat widget can be customized to align with brand personality, and look and feel. The color, brand icon, logo, and more can be easily changed within Netomi’s AI Studio.
- Seamless UX: The widget features quick replies, buttons, carousels and supports images and video to provide a highly immersive user experience. You can also allow users to make a reservation, book an appointment, and more using embeddable experiences.
- Highly accurate AI: Netomi’s chat widgets feature Netomi-powered virtual AI agents. The Netomi AI platform leverages a combination of natural language understanding and deep reinforcement to provide a very human-like experience and fully resolve tickets.
- The best knowledge base tool integration: You can connect your existing knowledge base to the chat widget and enable your AI chatbot to surface relevant articles to answer customers’ questions.
- Information collection: Embed custom interactive experiences such as forms and date pickers, and empower your customers to upload files that can easily be reviewed by your agents.
- Ticket creation in agent desk platforms: If a conversation needs to be escalated to a human agent, Netomi will create a ticket within your agent desk and include a chat transcript with contextual details.
Not all support live chat is created equally
Chat is only becoming a more important channel for support teams. No longer a nice-to-have, live chat support is a key way to provide immediate, personal, and convenient support to customers 24/7. It’s important to not rely solely on human agents for live chat, though. One study found that 1 in 5 customers are willing to stop using a product or service for slow response times via online chat5. What’s considered slow? If a chat isn’t answered in two minutes, consumers will abandon the conversation altogether. Leveraging AI-powered agents on chat can automatically resolve every day, repeatable tickets and ensure human agents at a virtual contact center use their time wisely: on more complex needs.
Not all chatbots, though, are the same. [See chatbot fails here]. When launching a chatbot, make sure you are using one that relies on sophisticated natural language understanding, not keyword matching, so you can empower your customers to engage naturally in conversation as if it were a human. The result? Happier and more loyal customers, reduced costs, and streamlined operations.
Would you like to learn more about the Netomi Chat Widget and powerful AI chatbot technology? Schedule a demo.
For more information, check out: Connect in Real-Time, Through Messaging Apps or Online: The 9 Best Live Chat Software
References
- https://99firms.com/blog/live-chat-statistics/#gref
- https://blog.olark.com/the-history-of-customer-service
- https://go.forrester.com/blogs/13-01-14-forresters_top_15_trends_for_customer_service_in_2013/
- https://www.superoffice.com/blog/live-chat-statistics/
- https://econsultancy.com/consumers-prefer-live-chat-for-customer-service-stats/
- https://www.icmi.com/resources/2015/the-stats-behind-chat-its-popular-and-growing
- https://www.whoson.com/ebooks/little-black-book-live-chat-stats/
- https://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Helpful-Live-Chat/1007235