So what are the differences between live chat and chat bots and why is it worth investing in the human touch for your financial services website?
Making a website simple and easy to use is crucial when it comes to lead generation and revenue growth. Many users will visit your website from their mobile while they are busy doing other things. Many will be in the market to do business there and then, while others might just be checking lending criteria or reaching out to numerous businesses to research their options. What they all want is for their online experience to be intuitive, fast and above-all productive. If it’s not, they’ll simply move on – meaning lost opportunity and revenue for you. It’s all about the customer experience.
Knowing the difference – people versus bots
Live chat has the power to turn a good online experience into an excellent one as it is centred on people helping people. It enables you to meet the intuitive, fast and productive requirements of customers by offering help and assistance in real time. With managed live chat, agents have real conversations, build relationships and answer questions, including those that are nuanced or even unclear, to resolve issues, share information and even book appointments and escalate issues quickly.
Live chat’s robotic chatbot counterpart forgoes the human touch and uses AI decision-tree programming to provide off-the-shelf answers to frequently asked questions. This can have real value for web visitors, giving them an easy way to seek clarification, find information and access a basic level of customer care. However when it’s faced with more complex questions or chatters fail to articulate themselves well, its limitations become clear. While chatbots can escalate enquiries to a person if necessary, they do not offer the same flexibility or scalability of a fully managed live chat service and are best used for less complex client and customer needs.
People-powered live chat offers a number of compelling benefits for financial businesses – they are:
1. Fast customer support: People are inherently impatient. When they cannot find the information they are looking for, they will simply go elsewhere which could meaning losing out on a new mortgage instruction, a pensions customer or an accountancy client. Managed chat services are much faster than any other customer support channel and can provide a resolution within the first contact.
2. Open 24/7: As more and more people embrace hybrid working, traditional 9-5 opening hours just aren’t enough. However, it’s virtually impossible to provide 24/7 customer support if you only have a small team of people working daytime hours. With dedicated live chat agents, it’s possible to keep you open for business, answering questions and offering a personalised human response at any time to suit your customer.
3. Keep volume away from the phones: During busy periods it can be useful to have a fast and efficient alternative to the phone. Live chat can triage enquiries so that phone calls aren’t necessary – a live chat handler can typically deal with 3 chats in the time it would take to handle one phone call. Plus, managed live chat frees up in-house teams to deal with more complex and higher value tasks without compromising service support and delivery.
4. Improve UX. Our research found that 44% of customers are looking for advice during an online purchase. What’s more, visitors that converse via live chat and enjoy a positive user experience are more likely to buy or convert on your website. Managed live chat is particularly helpful when trying to resolve more complicated scenarios – perhaps where people need to clarify detail about different options, pricing or services. Plus you can customise live chat greetings and pop ups by page to ensure you’re completely in sync with and on-hand for customers’ needs.
5. Showcase your brand: Most website visitors can tell if they’re talking to a human or a bot - and the answer tells them something about your brand and commitment to customer care. A human agent offers the personal touch, ensures empathy, can deal with situations as they unfold and adjust answers to suit brand guidelines.
6. Website works harder: With live chat you can push as much traffic to your website as your budget allows, knowing you have the ability to maximise the value of every visitor with real-time human customer care as and when it’s needed.
7. Offer choice: Not everyone wants to talk on the phone and not everyone can. To offer choice and improve accessibility for people of different abilities or in different scenarios, live chat provides another important channel.
8. Education and understanding: One of the most striking factors about live chat is that people are willing to divulge more about themselves using this medium than any other. Their perceived ‘silly questions’ which they might not want to voice over the phone, are much more likely to be asked because of the relatively anonymity of live chat. For financial businesses striving to support clients with greater education about their financial options, this presents a hugely powerful opportunity. Live chat can help to stimulate conversation and disseminate important information in a more effective, engaging and human way.
Automation is integral to modern life but when it comes to customer care, the human touch leaves the most positive and lasting impression of all.
