Reduce Churn, Costs, and Bounce Rate with Live Chat

Trust is a big part of any customer’s buying decision – especially when it involves an ongoing subscription. The online universe can be a scary place, and even potential customers who are interested in a product will check for clues that the business is on the up-and-up.

Offering a live chat option on your site is one of the fastest and most effective ways to show would-be buyers that there’s a real human being behind the digital presence. Read on to learn about how it can benefit your subscription business:

It boosts conversions and time on site

Having a live chat option on a business platform gives customers a chance to ask their questions, without leaving the site or having to pick up a phone and call someone. Because of this, live chat is great for boosting metrics like conversion and time on site.

Without the option of a live chat, someone who has questions or concerns has to either click around until they find a contact form and submit it, open their email app of choice and manually send an email, or call on the phone. All of these options take more work, so it’s no surprise that live chat is the preferred form of communication for most people. Without it, customers are more likely to simply move on and explore other places to buy from. To test this for yourself, you can set up lead source tracking with special tags for potential customers who use live chat, and see the results.

Customers can resolve disputes before they go public (or churn)

In this era of online reviews and social media, customers have a lot of power in their hands. Even the best-run business is likely to end up with a few disgruntled customers. Live chat gives them a way to resolve those disputes quickly, before the customer can fire off an angry tweet about it.

Live chat gives customers a way to reach out and get a fast response, so you can prevent public negative reviews, and hopefully keep that customer from churning. (And if you’re in the business of subscriptions, you know too well that reducing churn is the name of the game.) Live chat agents should be authorized to give customer discounts, remove disputed charges, and perform other forms of customer service, to maximize on the potential of chat and make sure every customer feels valued.

Live chat is cost-effective

In addition to all of this, live chat is also surprisingly cost-effective for two main reasons:

1. It allows for a customer service representative to take care of several users at once.
2. It enables businesses to make personalized recommendations to each user (which can increase your average order value).

In addition to these benefits, chatbots and other automated chat suggestions are becoming more and more sophisticated over time. Automated solutions absolutely don’t replace live chat – and relying on them too much can actually drive customers away. That said, having a few automated options to help customers resolve common problems, with the option of continuing to live chat, is a great way to streamline your customer service processes.

How to get started with live chat

Now you’re sold on the idea of live chat and want to get started setting it up on your website, right? Let’s talk about some popular options for setting up your new chat box:

• Intercom is a popular chat option (and one we’ve mentioned before), but it’s also one of the more expensive options, with their least expensive all-in-one plan clocking in at $136/month for up to 200 customers and 2 active users. (It’s worth noting that includes other features than live chat.)
• Olark focuses on specifically live chat options, and has a flat rate of $17/user/month. It’s primary selling points are that it’s easy to use and integrates with SalesForce, HubSpot, Groove, HelpScout, MailChimp, WordPress, and Google Analytics.
• Pure Chat is (as you probably guessed) focused specifically on chat. It has a free option available, with paid plans starting at $29/month. In addition to the browser interface, there’s a native mobile app to let you answer questions on the go. It integrates with Facebook, WordPress, and plenty of other apps via Zapier. They also have an open API, so you can build your own integrations.

Subscription business models are rapidly increasing in popularity, and live chat is undergoing similar growth. Pairing these two concepts together is a natural next step to create a cutting-edge business.

Once you’ve set up live chat, you should continue to take other steps to decrease your customer churn. One aspect of that is reducing chargebacks – to get your chargebacks under control, download our free guide that reveals the full cost of chargebacks and our top actionable tips to minimize your losses: