Dissecting the Cost Effectiveness of Live Chat
Leaders in customer service have acknowledged that live chat has evolved to be an important channel for providing the best customer experience. What seems to be a perceived delay in adoption of live chat by enterprises and companies stems from the lack of a presentation of its financial benefit, that is, the cost effectiveness of live chat, compared to traditional voice or phone support and e-mail.
It what way can you save costs by using live chat for business instead of traditional voice and email support?
Cost savings related to labor, hiring, training, management and technology can be made through Offerchat live chat because of a combination of two factors: live chat software and agent outsourcing.
Concurrency saves additional labor cost.
Perhaps the most obvious costs advantage that’s labor-related is the fact that chat agents can handle multiple customer interactions at once in contrast with voice support.
Concurrency, as it is called in the customer service industry, means the same volume of customer contacts can be handled by fewer agents.
With phone support, an agent can handle only one interaction whereas live chat agents can attend to 1-4 individuals simultaneously. This saves the business labor expenses (employee salaries) as, depending on their size and volume of clients or users, they would need fewer agents.
Live chat technology costs less.
A live chat platform like Offerchat is cloud-based and less expensive — unlike voice-based infrastructure which is typically more complicated and has to be deployed physically which, in turn, requires upfront investment costs. Add to the equation ongoing maintenance costs and it’s easy to dramatically tip the weighing scale to one side.
Even when a company adapts VoIP systems, the peripherals needed for voice support will still affect costs.
In contrast, a communication channel such as live chat with a technology that requires almost zero physical infrastructure other than the already existing office computer and with a significantly minimal upfront cost for the tool itself, businesses can scrimp on their budget without sacrificing quality of support.
Chat reduces hiring costs.
Most startups and fledgling small businesses are staffed by only a handful of people necessary for operations. However, once the business gains enough traction and consumers start to flock, general support demands will start rising too.
The need for more people in the team to cover the frontlines will be inevitable as you get traction. While a live chat agent hiring process should consider chat-centered skills aside from soft, customer service skills, the cost likely remains the same compared to hiring voice and email support agents.
But the time and the money spend in vetting applicants can be too costly. It can also lead you away from your core responsibilities as the owner. Most businesses nowadays, though, have put their trust in outsourcing customer support.
Chat reduces training and management costs.
The future onboarding of live chat outsourcing involves business managers maintaining a knowledge reservoir of sorts for customer service agents to keep tab with. This is a lot cheaper than hiring a separate product trainer and paying for full-time salaries and benefits.
For small to medium-sized businesses, management can look over core operations without having a separate branch handling support. Because the live chat platform is cloud-based and pretty straightforward, with much of the communication happening via written word exchanges in real time, the system is compact and easy to manage.
Cheby writes about live chat insights, improving conversions, epic customer service, online marketing and everything in between. She will take you by the hand in exploring how to extend your website's earning power through Offerchat's smart live chat tool, and even smarter live chat people.
