Ah, live chat. Every day, I become more convinced that it’s the king of all customer service options.

You might be wondering what makes live chat so great. How, you ask, might live chat be so different from the traditional customer service routes of email and phone support?

Well, let me counts the ways…

First, live chat has a reputation for not only decreasing shopping cart abandonment, but increasing average order value by at least 30%. It’s not too shabby as a conversion rate increaser. CompUSA, for example, boasted a ten-fold increase after implementing live chat on their website. Not bad. Not bad at all.

But enough about the facts and figures. Let’s talk about some practical reasons why live chat should be your go-to customer support service.

• Obliterates language barriers

One of the great things about live chat is that it has the ability to destroy language barriers. You can definitely find live chat software out there that’s equipped to act as a virtual translator between seller and buyer. This means that you can sell to customers who you wouldn’t normally be able to reach. It widens your market and gives you an edge over those businesses that only cater to prospects that speak the same language as them.

• A virtual full-service CS stop

By adding live chat, you also give your customers a new way with which to interact with you. A few years ago, using a contact email address was sufficient for prospects. Then, email was one of the easiest and most convenient ways to contact a business. But today, email can almost seem like a sales barrier. It may only take a few seconds for prospects to send an email to you, but the wait time for responses is far less predictable. Nothing turns me off more than reading a “receipt” message that states that a response should be received within 3 days. Three days?! I want my answer now! You can bet that your prospects do, too. Give it to them by providing a real-time Q&A session in the form of live chat. Lots of times, your prospect can walk away a customer within five minutes of hitting the “connect” button. What’s not to love about that?

• Active marketing

Live chat is great for active marketing. This is in part due, no doubt, to the availability of salespeople during sessions. “Help” can come in the form of suggesting compatible items that will, in turn, be added to shopping carts.

The bonus? Live chat can be tracked by Google now. If you’re inclined to use the feature, you can access reports that can give you insight into geographic regions, keywords, sources and navigation paths. All this can make your live chat marketing efforts even easier.

• Builds trust

When prospects want answers, they have questions. That’s a given. But one of the questions that may not be wholeheartedly recognized by businesses is the one of legitimacy. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that one reason why prospects click on “connect” is because they want to make sure that there is someone on the other end- someone who is a representative of a legit business, interested in providing solutions to customers’ problems. Having someone ready and willing to help them builds trust and eases fears. That type of thing is a long way from scam artists who generally want to get personal information from victims in the most hassle-free way and with as little interaction as possible.

When you think about live chat in these ways, it can seem like the win-win answer to customer service situations that have hounded online businesses for years. Indeed, some businesses readily recognize that live chat is the less stressful and more cost-effective option to phone support.

Considerations

But live chat isn’t a self-service solution. That is to say, reaping the benefits of it won’t happen without a little help from you.

Strategically placing your “live chat” icon on your website’s hotspots can mean all the difference for your conversion rates. There’s an optimal place for everything, and you can be sure that there will be an optimal place for your icon.

Of course, the above is assuming that you’re the type of business owner who will wait for prospects to contact you.

There are a few businesses out there that are much more aggressive and choose to initiate conversations. They do this because they know how profitable live chat can be. Perhaps you have “standard” navigational paths that you’ve ascertained that customers take. If prospects deviate from them, you may consider having an agent pop up and ask if they need help getting back on track.

The same concept can be applied when you’ve noticed that a prospect has spent a certain amount of time on a page without any activity, though the merits of this type of move have been debated. For example, prospects would likely consider an agent’s window blocking product descriptions that they’re trying to read to be the virtual equivalent of a pushy salesperson. And they could leave in a huff.

Regardless of the methods you implement, there is a one general understood truth…

To get the most out of live chat, you would have to be “live” all the time. There’s no use in advertising a feature like that if you’re planning to power it down regularly. Hiring and training staff to be on all the time can contribute to keeping your “live chat” “live.” Outsourcing agents will even do.

Anything is better than putting up an “offline” sign.

Why? Because an “offline” icon is the equivalent of a “closed” sign. To a prospect, it simply tells them that you’re closed, or worse, not in business. They’d take that as an order to go elsewhere- to a competitor.

Do you use live chat? What have your experiences been like with conversions?