A company’s journey to the top is determined by how well its customer service functions. But space is not what it used to be ten years ago.
Social media has brought about a complete revolution in the domain where customers can now broadcast their experiences to the world. And it goes without saying, even a single instance of bad customer experience can turn out to be detrimental to the reputation of the business.
Even the best of the lot can make mistakes. However, the way these mistakes get addressed differentiates the good from the great.
Why Is Customer Retention Important?
A study by Gartner states that 80% of the average company’s future gains come from 20% of its existing customer base.
So, why not go after new customers rather than try to retain the existing ones?
But this is what the author of Pricing of Profitability, John L. Day says.
“Conventional business wisdom contends that it costs ten times as much to obtain a new customer as it does to retain an existing customer.”
Many people agree with this.
A major part of customer success and support has to do with personalization. It is one of the ways that business owners can use to win over their customers over a lifetime.
Because when you ensure customer retention, you ensure success for your business too.
Can Live Chat Applications Help?
Customers today are looking for instant fulfillment. And technology has a big role to play in this transformation. That’s because it contributes towards shaping people’s expectations which includes customers too.
With web forms quickly going out of style, live chat is one mode that businesses can make use of to offer instant gratification to their customers.
For example, when a customer fills out a web form, he or she typically has to wait for a few days before the customer service department responds to it. There will probably a series of emails going back and forth before the issue is resolved or the query answered successfully. The entire process is time-consuming.
On the other hand, a WooCommerce Live Chat Plugin, for example, can resolve the customer’s queries are instantly answered. This keeps them more satisfied and loyal to the brand, long-term. As Bain & Company states, improving customer retention by 5% can increase profits anywhere between 25% to 95%.
What Live Chat Strategies Can You Employ to Ensure Customer Retention?
So, what steps can you take to ensure that your customers keep coming back to you?
Implementing these strategies will help you win over your customers in the long run.
Customer Service with a Touch of Personalization:
You can add live chat to the WordPress site, which is a solid start. The idea is to have the software man your website with specific responses that will assist your customers find solutions to what they are looking for. Minimizing friction and removing roadblocks in the process certainly expedites the process.
With a touch of personalization, it is necessary to achieve this level of service as research says that 89% of customers are ready to switch brands if their service expectations are not met.
Get Your Customers to Rate Your Service:
The probability of 89% of customers jumping ship can be pretty scary. Even if you have a Live Chat for WooCommerce embedded with your site, you still need to be working on strategies to improve your service. Make sure that you continuously monitor the efforts that you are putting into your customer service via live chat integration in order to optimize them further.
A post-chat survey can be extremely useful in this scenario. Get the user to rate your service and offer feedback and how you can serve them better in the future. Seeking immediate action means that their feedback is fresh in the minds, thus very relevant to improving your service operations.
Invest in Brand Recall:
The ProProfs WordPress live chat plugin, for instance, offers vital real estate that you can use to create some brand recall for your business. Otherwise, a window with no branding gets boring. There would be nothing to differentiate your brand from your competitors.
Live chat helps you to concentrate on the quality of the conversation. The use of this support tool allows your brand to build a personality through customer communication that most businesses fail to see. In a nutshell, the way your operators make an experience for customers becomes the deciding factor whether your customers will remember your brand or not.
By infusing your live chat for WordPress with some personality can help in emphasizing your brand’s image. In the long run, it will continue to instill customer loyalty towards your brand those who frequently visit your website.
Set Up Specific Triggers and Responses:
You must take up a more proactive approach via your live chat tool. This will ultimately save you hours of typing responses to monotonous queries. But one key element that matters here is the response time.
Harvard Business Review published a study where it was reported that “businesses who respond within one hour are 7 times more likely to have meaningful conversations with those who reach out.”
Unless you are quick with your responses, you are in grave danger of losing out on customers to your competitors. To get around this, setting up a series of triggered messages and responses in sequences can work well. While you can still inject a level of personalization in these messages even through automation, just make sure that it adds value in terms of what your customers expect from your business.
In Summation
Retaining customers is a hard job. And while there are a number of tools that can help you achieve your goal, world-class customer service using smart tools like live chat can help you do that in a more streamlined and simplified fashion. At the end of the day, it’s back to basics with a killer service for your customers.
Author Bio
David is a customer service expert. As a customer service strategist and execution expert at ProProfs, he has offered unique strategies to website owners who wish to learn deeply about WordPress Live Chat Plugin to build a delightful experience. Follow David @Davidmiller4312 or connect on LinkedIn.
