Arena Live Chat is one of the most powerful live chat platforms on the market. If you’re undecided on whether to try it, you might not know about the benefits.
Top 40 Live Chat Benefits
1) Increase sales
There’s a saying in sales: the confused mind does not buy. When customers have questions or doubts, they are less likely to buy. With Arena Live Chat on your website, you can make it easy for customers to get answers about potential purchases. By providing quick answers to interested customers, you can earn more sales.
2) Build a community of fans on your website
Customers are probably talking about your brand and products, but those conversations are not happening on your website. Instead, those conversations are probably already happening on social media sites like your company’s Facebook page. When people talk about your brand away from your website, it is tough for you to provide answers and drive conversions.
By adding Arena Live Chat to your website, you can build a thriving community of users in two ways. First, your customers can make friends with each other during group chat sessions. Second, you can provide a welcoming virtual place for customers to come together as a community. If you want to see some solid events, check out how Nubank leveraged Anita’s community engagement for its IPO live event, or how Vans uses Arena Live Chat to aid live DJ music sets in its website.
3) Keep people on your website longer
According to Crazy Egg, the average person only spends 15 seconds on a website before leaving. Yikes! That’s not much time to make a good impression, let alone earn a sale or generate a lead. What if you could encourage users to spend 10 minutes or even an hour on your website happily?
That’s possible when you organize a virtual event with Arena Live Chat. For example, you could invite a social media influencer to present a live stream video session for an hour. During that session, attendees can ask questions through Arena Live Chat. In addition, you will have the opportunity to drive conversions by using the conversion card feature in Arena.
4) Qualify leads for the sales team
Is your sales team too busy with prospects who are not a fit for your products? That’s a problem you can solve by using Arena Live Chat. Invite customers to answer a few simple questions through chat before booking a call with sales.
For example, consider a B2B company that mainly sells to large companies with more than $100 million in revenue. In that case, the sales team shouldn’t spend their time talking to small businesses. You can use Arena Live Chat to qualify leads before they are sent to the sales team.
5) Reduce customer service delays
Forcing customers to wait in long phone queues to get customer service is no longer good enough. In 2020, more than 10% of customers abandoned their calls before being connected to an agent. When a customer gives up on their call, that disappointment hurts your company in two ways. First, you have lost a potential sale today. Second, the frustrated customer may complain to their friends and family.
Offering customer service through Arena Live Chat can help you to minimize customer service delays. For the best results, equip your customer service agents with a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document and other training to help them answer common questions quickly.
6) Create more engaging live events
Offering a live virtual event to your customers is a great way to build loyalty and drive sales. When planning an event, use the virtual events checklist to plan your event properly. At the same time, you also want to allow for some flexibility to adjust your topics based on what your customers are most interested in.
With Arena Live Chat, you can ask poll questions during an event to gather quick feedback. At the end of the event, you could ask attendees to vote on what your next live event should focus on. Acting on this feedback means you can avoid the frustration of offering live events that nobody is interested in attending. Swoogo has already found out that offering Live Chat is a home-run in live events.
7) Boost conversions in live shopping events
Live shopping events are an exciting way to drive increased sales. According to McKinsey, live shopping events may generate between 10-20% of all ecommerce sales by 2026.
During these events, customers are likely to have questions about product size, color, shipping, and much more. To make the most of your live shopping events, provide fast answers through Arena Live Chat.
8) Gain feedback on new product ideas
Are you debating what product to launch next? You could use market research surveys to gather insight on what people might want. That kind of research will yield some valuable insights. However, there is an even better way – get insight directly from customers using Arena Live Chat.
For instance, let’s say that you run a clothing brand and consider offering a line of blankets for winter. Before investing time in manufacturing and marketing, ask your next 100 live chat users if they are interested in a blanket. If the customers are interested, take note of their contact details and follow up with them later if you launch the product.
9) Improve your chatbots
Adding a chatbot to your website is an excellent way to provide even faster customer service. However, chatbots are only as good as their input. One of the best ways to make your chatbots more effective is to look through your Arena Live Chat transcripts. You’re bound to find new ideas to make your chatbots more effective.
10) Enable flexible remote work
Survey after survey has shown that flexible remote work is popular with employees. According to Forbes, 74% of professional workers expect remote work to become standard in the coming years.
Give your employees the option to provide customer service, event support, and sales through live chat sessions. Giving your employees flexibility about when and where they work can drive productivity and help you retain more trained workers.
11) Add value to your product’s customization options
Many companies offer many different features, options, and customization choices. For example, think of an online jewelry store that lets customers choose different types of metal or engraving. Many customers like the idea of additional choices, but there is a downside. Your customers might get confused about how to use the options.
Use Arena Live Chat as a solution to this problem – let customers ask questions about custom options. With practice, you may even be able to increase the average order value by selling more upgrades.
12) Provide the most up to date information
Supply chain problems, new product launches, and staff turnover are just some of the changes your company might be managing today. With all of these changes, the information on your website might be out of date. For example, you might only be able to offer a few of your products in the extra-large size category.
With Arena Live Chat, you can invite customers to confirm the details of their order before they buy. This is a great way to prevent buyer’s remorse and disappointment.
13) Offer personalized service
Think about the last time you went to an excellent restaurant or hotel. The way staff greeted you and addressed your concerns was probably a big part of the experience. For example, you might have been asked if you were celebrating an occasion. Taking the time to ask a few good questions makes it much easier to offer a memorable customer service experience.
By engaging each customer through Arena Live Chat, you have the opportunity to build a relationship with the customer. Taking the time to listen to their comments and questions means customers are more likely to come back to your company.
14) Improve the quality of your sales training
Hiring and training a new salesperson is one of the best ways to grow a business. Unfortunately, it often takes a lot of trial and error for a junior salesperson to become effective. With the right approach, it’s possible to get sale people working productively quickly. How? Harness the power of live chat.
To improve the quality of your sale training, keep a log of the most common questions that customers ask during your Arena Live Chat sessions. By developing accurate and persuasive answers to those questions, your salespeople can be prepared to answer common concerns and close more sales.
15) Enhance the post-sales experience
Making a sale today matters, but the long term is even more critical. If you engage customers thoroughly and pay attention to the details, they are more likely to keep buying from you in the future.
You can enhance the post-sales customer experience with Arena Live Chat. For example, send customers a message inviting them to ask questions when their new product arrives. Nobody likes to look uninformed but accepting an invitation to a live chat session is different.
16) Grow customer service agent productivity
More sales mean more customer service employees, right? Not necessarily! It all depends on how you plan out your customer service program. For example, a company that only offers telephone customer service might hire more staff to keep up with demand.
By offering Arena Live Chat, you can grow customer service productivity without skyrocketing your costs. Why? A customer service person can easily maintain a few chat sessions at the same time.
17) Encourage employee service specialization
Specialized employees are often able to provide better customer service and close more sales. Yet, encouraging generalist employees to develop a specialty can be difficult. One way to overcome this reluctance is to start small: encourage specialization through chat.
With Arena Live Chat, employees work with different kinds of customers and sales conversations. After a few weeks, they may better understand what kinds of customers and products they find most interesting. In this manner, live chat helps your employees quickly discover their strengths and build expertise.
18) Enhance the quality of your sales coaching
Sales managers have an essential role to play in helping their employees to improve their sales skills. Unfortunately, it is relatively complex for a sales manager to observe their sales reps in action and provide timely feedback. Asking managers to review live chat sessions can help.
When your sales representatives finish a sales chat session, encourage them to send the transcript to their manager for review. By asking an experienced person to review the interaction, it should be easy to find a few ways to improve. For example, the sales manager might encourage their staff to ask more questions early in the chat session to understand customer needs better.
19) Reduce painful interruptions for customers
In today’s digital world, it is difficult to get focused. Once you get down to work, the last thing you want is an unwanted sales call. At the same time, managers know it is essential to make it easy for customers to reach out.
Adding Arena Live Chat to your website makes it easy for customers to reach out when they have questions. By focusing your effort on people interested in what you have to offer, you can avoid wasting time on disinterested people.
20) Never lose another sales lead
In benefit 4, you learned that live chat could be an excellent way to qualify sales leads. That is helpful if your business is overwhelmed with prospects. Your situation might be quite different. If you are struggling to meet your revenue goals, you can use live chat to maximize leads instead.
Use Arena Live Chat to engage every website visitor and ask them questions about their needs. In this way, you can make a personalized pitch to every person who comes through your website.
21) Make your website more inviting to customers
Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect visiting a traditional website. It is a passive window shopping experience. You can look at product photos, view videos, and look up order status information. The lack of interaction means customers may become disengaged before finding the right product.
Adding Arena Live Chat to your website makes your website more like a store where employees greet customers as they come in. By making your website more inviting, customers may be more comfortable asking questions.
22) Discover your customer’s pain points and solve them
Right now, your potential customers have questions, concerns, and worries about doing business with you. They might be worried that your shipping service or return policy isn’t going to work for them. Every business has different customer concerns to face. Ultimately, you can only solve these problems and get more sales if you know those concerns.
You can discover the worries that hold people back from buying by encouraging customers to ask more questions through Arena Live Chat. Once you have those insights, you can update your website to answer those concerns.
23) Cross-sell related products and accessories
Cross-selling is one of the best ways to increase revenue. Fast food restaurants mastered this technique years ago by offering customers fries, drinks, and other items when they ordered. You can make similar offers to customers once you start a conversation.
For example, let’s say you have an online sports apparel store. A customer might start by asking about running shoes. By offering an Arena Live Chat session on your product page, you can answer questions about shoes and suggest related products (e.g., running shorts and shirts).
24) Meet customer expectations for interaction
Keeping up with changing customer expectations is essential. For example, most businesses know that they need a modern website and a social media presence today. Today, many customers expect a live chat experience. More than 40% of customers expect live chat on the websites they use, and that number is likely to rise.
To stay competitive with customer demand, install Arena Live Chat on your website. You can get started for free.
25) Track customer service performance
Do you know if your customer service is performing well? Traditional ways of measuring performance – like measuring how long it takes to answer a phone call – are limited. It is far better to look at the quality of live chat interactions.
Arena Live Chat includes analytics so that you can better understand how well you are answering customer questions over time.
26) Serve international customers
Did you know that more than one-quarter of revenue earned by S&P 500 companies came from outside the US? Your company might have customers around the world! Serving customers in different time zones and languages doesn’t have to be complicated.
Arena Live Chat can run around the clock on your website. For example, you can staff your live chat function with staff in the US and UK to provide customer service in the US and Europe.
27) Reduce product returns
When unhappy customers return products, your profitability is likely to suffer. Unfortunately, product returns are a significant problem for online companies. CNBC reports the returns cost the retail industry over $1 trillion annually.
To reduce your product return expenses, engage customers in more conversations before they buy. Taking 5 minutes to answer questions before a customer buys pays off right away in higher satisfaction, lower complaints, and fewer returns.
28) Engage B2B or B2C leads
Consumers and corporate customers have different needs. A corporate employee buying laptops might have questions about contracts, support services, and discounts if they order 500 computers. In contrast, a consumer may ask questions like which computer is best for gaming.
If your company sells to multiple markets, use Arena Live Chat to start the conversation. If a customer says they are buying on behalf of a company, you can route the inquiry to the B2B team to address right away.
29) Troubleshoot live shopping
Live shopping events are taking off in popularity for many ecommerce companies. These events blend entertainment and retail into an appealing package. However, many consumers are still learning how to use this technology. When technical problems occur during these events, providing fast support is critical.
In your next live shopping event, use Arena Live Chat as your support platform. If you fail to offer easy-to-access support, customers experiencing technical problems might give up and leave your event.
30) Build trust in your company
Building trust with customers in the online world can be challenging. Customers may be worried about their privacy and security. Others may wonder if your company can deliver. Facing these concerns directly through a conversation is one of the best approaches.
You can use Arena Live Chat to build trust with your potential customers through multiple interactions. Taking the time to answer questions today through live chat means you can make a positive impression.
31) Improve webinars and virtual classes with feedback
Delivering a webinar or virtual class is a powerful way to equip people with new knowledge. Yet, there are downsides to virtual education and training. It is difficult for the teacher to connect with their audience. Without that connection, students may become disengaged.
With the polls feature of Arena Live Chat, you can make your online learning more engaging. For instance, you can follow up on an assignment with a poll and determine which topics students want to cover in a review. In this way, a teacher can quickly adapt a virtual class to suit student needs.
32) Make asking questions embarrassment free
Asking questions is the key to unlocking sales and connecting with customers. However, some people are reluctant to raise their hands and ask a question. Why? Nobody enjoys looking uninformed, especially in front of an audience, like a live virtual event.
Using the direct message (DM) feature of Arena Live Chat solves this problem. Event attendees can ask questions privately without fear of embarrassment by sending a DM to the event host.
33) Run engaging family-friendly virtual events
Offering a virtual event suitable for the whole family is challenging. For example, a sports broadcaster might want to encourage a broad audience to view online coverage and participate in online coverage. A public virtual event carries a risk – some people might attempt to disrupt the event with profanity or spam comments. Failing to address this kind of disruption quickly can make the event hosts look incompetent.
Arena Live Chat comes with moderation tools that make it simple to stop profanity automatically. In addition, you can quietly remove disruptive users from the live chat event. These features make it much easier to keep your virtual events engaging and family-friendly.
34) Support advanced marketing campaigns
The changing landscape of digital marketing means companies have to change how they engage with customers. Recent changes by Apple and Google are making traditional digital marketing methods less effective.
One solution to these challenges lies in leveraging the Arena customer data platform and live chat together. For instance, you can identify patterns between customer interests (e.g., sports, business, lifestyle) as expressed in website activity and purchases. Understanding these links can help you to create more relevant marketing campaigns.
35) Quickly improve website engagement
In the online world, high engagement is crucial. Low engagement can cause your conversions to fall. There are also signs that Google and other search engines consider user engagement from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. Unfortunately, some ways to increase engagement are brutal, like redesigning an entire website!
On the other hand, you can install Arena Live Chat on your website in less than 10 minutes. It is one of the fastest ways to make your website more engaging.
36) Improve question & answer (Q&A) sessions
In live shopping events, webinars, and other live events, you might decide to offer a dedicated Q&A session at the end of the event. In larger events with dozens or hundreds of participants, keeping up with the questions is tricky, especially if questions are mixed with other comments in the chat window.
Arena Live Chat makes Q&A sessions easy to manage by organizing all live chat questions in a dedicated Q&A area. Event moderators can then decide which questions to answer.
37) Boost engagement with chat channels
In a conference, participants can go to panels and sessions that specifically relate to their interests. With virtual live events, it can be more challenging to engage each niche interest. Using custom chat channels is one way to solve this engagement challenge.
Arena Live Chat offers dedicated channels for your live chat sessions. For example, you could have one channel for customers, one for technical support, and one for future event suggestions.
38) Keep users engaged with social profiles
Nobody likes to feel like a number in the online world. Unfortunately, some chat tools give users generic usernames and numbers. It doesn’t have to be that way.
When users sign up on Arena Live Chat, they can create custom user profiles with avatars to make them more personal.
39) Avoid live chat reply confusion
With dozens, hundreds, or thousands of live chat participants, it is easy to get confused. One friend might send a question in the chat room to somebody else only to obscure that question by the flood of chat comments.
Arena Live Chat offers reply features so that user replies are kept together with the main message. That’s valuable because user conversations are never lost in the noise as a result.
40) Drive conversions with conversion cards
Organizing a virtual event takes significant time and effort. You might spend hours writing a virtual event script, inviting guest speakers, and promoting the event. Offering interesting content matters, but you also have to watch business results like conversions and purchases.
Arena Live Chat helps you achieve goals like lead generation and purchases through conversion cards. You can use these cards at several points during your live chat session to draw attention to your offers. By using a few conversion cards at every event, you’ll never have to struggle to prove the ROI of your live chat events.
Get Started Today For Free
Arena Live Chat is simple to install – most customers install it on their websites in less than 10 minutes. Not sure if it is suitable for your company? You can try Arena Live Chat for free.
