MBA1616 Should You Offer Chat Support in Your Business?

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Chat support is one of the best ways to not only support your current customers, but to bring in new customers to answer your website visitors questions about your products, your services and allow them to feel confident enough to sign up. But there are things you need to look out for before you take the plunge. Before you decide to offer chat in your business, Chat support is a fantastic solution. It's a great way to increase business and keep business. I know this firsthand with Webinar Ninja, our webinar software. But there are things you need to consider before you make this decision. You need to make sure your business is ready to serve customers with chat. The dynamic of chat is that it's live. It's not asynchronous like email support. It's a whole new dynamic and you need to make sure that you deliver it properly to your customers. You don't want to turn customers away or disappoint the ones you already have. We're going to make sure of it in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, chat support is a great solution. We've been doing chat support at Webinar Ninja for over four years now. We offer 24.7live support and it's one of the hallmarks of our company. It's one of the big reasons why our customers stay customers and the reason people choose us over our competitors. But there was a lot of work that needed to be done before we were ready to offer chat support. There's some foundational work you need to do and things you need to consider before you make that switch. It's also important to understand that once you offer chat support, it's one of those things that once you offer it, it's really hard for you not to offer it again. So once people get used to a certain level of support, you know, you might start with email, then you'll add chat support if things are not going right or you didn't set yourself up properly, and then you remove chat support. This can disgruntled some customers and it really can affect their experience and make them feel like really you took something away from them that they're used to and may. So there are a few things I want to highlight that will help you get prepared to launch chat support in your business the right way. First of all, why would you want to offer chat support in the first place? Why don't you just stick to email? Well, more and more, every single day, every single month, every single year, chat support is becoming the new phone support. People actually prefer to chat now, text, than to get on a phone call. It's often faster to solve a problem or get questions answered through chat support. Think about it. Most people don't make phone calls or take phone calls or get phone calls that often, but they send a lot of text messages and Facebook messages and WhatsApp and all that stuff. It's a way for you to go back and forth with your customer live and get them a win in that moment, in the moment they reach you, in the moment they visit your website allows them to make a decision quickly rather than they hit your website and then they're like, oh, I have a couple questions. Let me see if they have an email or a contact form. And most people don't even go that far. They just leave the website and check out a competitor. But if you have chat support, it allows them to say, hey, I got a quick question. Let me just ask it right now. There's somebody right there. And that question can be very simple. It could be something overlooked. It could be something that's not on your website or on your. Your sales pages. And the answer to that question could make them feel confident enough to make a purchase right then and there. It's also a huge benefit, a huge benefit for your customers that are already paying you. They feel like you always have their back and you're just one message away. And flat out, chat support is just, you can send emojis and GIFs and funny images and you can really express your brand and your style through chat that email really doesn't do as well. A lot of our branding is done through chat support. A lot of our customers become customers because they're like, I really like your style on chat. Your team really made me feel comfortable and welcomed in a professional yet casual way. So what are some of the things that you need to consider before you say, yep, let me go ahead and go with chat support? The first thing I want to say to you is a lot of people think, okay, what software do I need to chat with? You know, there's a lot of chat software out there, whether it's Intercom or Freshdesk or Zendesk or Help Scout, there's so many out there, right. And all the softwares are pretty much the same. It depends on your needs. I'm not going to really get into that right now. That's the easy part. But one of the things you need to consider is your customer base. Where is your customer base? Do you serve only a national market that covers maybe a few time zones, or are your customers international around the world? If that's the case, you need to make sure you're able to offer your chat support 24, 7 throughout the day so you can cover the entire globe. That means having at least three people on chat or on your customer support team if each of them have an eight hour shift. Now, some people, they start with five days a week of chat versus seven days a week and that's a good way to get into the game. But if your customers are global, you need to consider the fact that you can't just offer chat certain hours of the day because those hours could just be in the middle of the night for somebody else and, and it's just really not a benefit at all. You also have to take a look at if you have the manpower, the staff to be able to handle the amount of chats you're getting. Now, if you're on email support right now, this is not a good measure. Why? Because email support takes a little bit effort for the customer to actually send an email. They'll probably go through a few other hoops or maybe check out the tutorials or do a little bit of reading or try to figure it out themselves before they email. And this is why a lot of people start with email, because it lowers the number of support requests, but also drastically lowers the number of pre sell emails or chats or messages. So as soon as you offer chat on your website, it's going to invite more conversation. That's a good thing because you're getting in touch with your customers and you're making connections. But it's also something you need to consider because if you were getting, let's say, 100 emails a day in email support, that's no indication of how many messages you're going to get in chat, because that's really going to open up the floodgates. Because now it's easily accessible, people can easily chat with you and send a message. It's not always easy to predict, but the traffic to your website is really a good indicator. If you're getting over 100,000 visitors to your website, you're going to have a good amount of those people chatting with you asking questions. I would say 10% is a good measure. At least 10% people are going to reach out and ask questions, especially if you prompt them to ask questions, which is really cool you can do in chat. They're on the pricing page, you can ask them, hey, you got any questions about pricing or choosing the right plan for yourself, Chat away with us. But if you think about that, if you have 100,000 visitors every month, that means 10,000 people will chat with you every month. Now, you might think that's a lot. It is a lot. And it's better for you to overestimate and be ready for the traffic. Even if I'm being conservative at 5%, it's still a lot of people chatting. So be mindful that you're going to be opening the floodgates when you offer the chat bubble on your website because you're going to say, hey, we want to talk to you. So if you're not prepared to have the manpower to serve them, if you're thinking you can handle this all by yourself as the leader of your business as a CEO, I really would strongly suggest you get a at least a one team member to do the chat. If you have one time zone you're going to cover or start assembling a team. And that kind of leads me to more of a philosophical point, is that when you start opening up chat or you start offering it, you're really taking a different stance philosophically about how you want to communicate with your customers. This means you want to talk to customers, you want to have conversations, you want to be able to go back and forth and answer questions and even sell to them or even your current customers, give them fast, responsive support. So you have to be bought into this, and you got to see the hires that you're making in your support team as investments. To one, keep the customers you have lower churn, have higher retention, and of course, convert more people that are visiting to your website into customers. Once you start seeing it as an investment, you start to realize, okay, this is actually a good investment. Let me make some hires, let me build out my team. Because these people that I'm going to have join my team and help me with my customers, they're really going to make sure I'm going to get a return on investment. Because their whole point is to serve the customers, make them feel comfortable, make them feel like they're making the right choice by visiting that website and make the choice to choose your business and your product instead of the competitors. When I say investment, I say also, you're going to make an investment in that team. You need to make sure you train them, you support them, you incentivize them to make sure that they're giving great quality support. One of the things I love about chat support, that I highly encourage you to kind of shift your mindset a little bit, is that chat support allows you to really differentiate yourself. Support in general, you know, but chat support really lends itself to this. When I say differentiation is that, you know, your competitors can go tit for tat with features and pricing and all that kind of stuff, but they can't compete on support. They can't compete on great service. That's something that you can own and really, really differentiate yourself. This is what we did. We tripled down on this when it came to our support team at Webinar Ninja, our software, because we knew that the competitors out there, their biggest complaints on review sites were, hey, your support is not responsive, it's not helpful. I'm not getting the answers I'm looking for. So we're like, hey, we can really win our customers over by being the market leader in support, and you could do the same in your market. This is how Zappos became, you know, such a huge hit and got bought out by Amazon. They just said, we're going to be the best customer support experience ever. And people are going to choose us because they love the support. Mind you, they don't have really control over the products, meaning that they sell the same products that you can buy at a store or any other online store. Shoes, sneakers, or dress shoes. They're in a very highly competitive market. So they've differentiated by saying, hey, but they can't offer the great support that we do. Let's go all in on support.

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Guys, to wrap up today's lesson, I want to point out that chat support can also be something that you charge for. It's not only something that you could just offer to everybody, but you can offer chat support to your customers at a higher tier as an add on. And a lot of people are willing to pay for it because when they need help they want help instantly and they want to go back and forth quickly. So if right now you don't have the budget, the finance to build out your chat support team, this is a good way to introduce it is just, you know, make it an add on or charge for it. That way you could pay for it through the customers. You know, the customers when they pay for it, that will kind of finance your support team and be able to offer that chat support. You can also roll that out by region. You could say we're offering chat support for people in the US or offering chat support in Europe and then slowly build out your international team so you don't have to hire you know, three or four people from the get go. You can start with one, then two, then three. And of course if you're charging, you're only offering it to people that are in that area. So that's an easy way to kind of roll out into it slowly. Guys, thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us an itunes rating and review. We would love to hear what you think? Don't forget, when you leave us a rating and review, you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Just listen in on Friday to see if you win a free ride to one of our programs. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I mentioned hiring for chat support because the type of agent, you know, customer service agent, they need to hire that can handle chat is different from somebody who can handle email support. Email support is a lot less pressure. They have a little bit more time to respond. It's not live. With live chat support, you gotta be quick. You gotta be fast on your feet. You have to understand how to manage more than one chat at one time. And it's not like I'm gonna dump five sentences in one chat message. I can go one by one and just walk along with the customer. It's a different skill. So make sure you look for people that are experienced in that area that have done chat support before so they can come in and hit the ground running. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode, Free Ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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