As a consumer yourself, you probably know that live chat has gone from a customer preference to an expectation. A survey reported that live chat leads to a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour and a 40% increase in conversion rate. Furthermore, approximately 41% of customers expect to see a chat option when they land on your website, and 41% of consumers prefer live chat support over any other channel.
However, not all live chat solutions are created equal. Especially when it comes to driving and converting leads.
Read on to learn how Podium’s Webchat can help you generate leads and deliver a better customer experience for every website visitor.
What is Webchat?
Most live chats send your customers to chat with a bot or third party and are mainly used for customer service. How is Podium Webchat different? It isn’t a live chat. It’s a text messaging solution that helps you effectively capture and manage website leads more efficiently.
Webchat turns website conversations into text conversations by connecting your customers to you immediately and routing them to the specific team members who will be most able to help them. This lead generation process has obvious benefits for both you and your customers as it:
- Connects customers to someone who actually knows how to answer their questions.
- Significantly shortens your sales cycle from your landing page.
- Greatly improves your customer experience by increasing convenience and speed.
How to Generate Quality Leads with Webchat
Since other live chats are often open 24/7, they tend to gather lots of leads. But you don’t just want more leads—you want qualified leads who will close. Webchat vets your leads by collecting information up front, significantly increasing the quality of leads who contact your business. This means you close more often—and more quickly, too.
With other live chat solutions, you usually don’t get a lot of information about your leads—you just get a one-off conversation. You often have to wait for context—and asking for that context later can feel intrusive. Podium’s Webchat captures all lead information upfront and allows the conversation to be ongoing. That’s why it’s:
- Less intrusive and more straightforward.
- More valuable to your customers (because they’re willing to give up their contact info, they’re more invested from the beginning).
- Context-rich.
- A solution that creates relationships and ongoing conversations.
How Webchat Improves the Customer Experience
Other live chat solutions tie you and your customers to a computer screen. Consumers have to keep their browsers open, which is frustrating not only when they need to leave, but also when browser issues occur. Instead, you’re meeting your leads where they’re at—on their phones—and giving them the option to make you a permanent addition to their contact list.
Texting is becoming increasingly important in business communication, as a recent survey indicates:
- Consumers agree that texting makes working with a local business more convenient.
- Consumers are almost twice as likely (1.8x) to prefer texting over any other communication method.
- Over 40% of consumers say they are more interested in texting with a business now than they were prior to COVID-19.
- Over 40% of consumers say they are “likely” or “very likely” to switch to a different business because they offer text messaging to communicate.
While other live chats hamper flexibility for you and your customers, Podium’s Webchat consistently delivers a better experience by allowing you to communicate with customers through their preferred channel.
How Webchat Makes Things Easier for You
Many customers complain that other live chat solutions aren’t easy to set up. They are complicated to use and have a steep learning curve, especially when it comes to optimizing your bot to answer questions.
Podium’s Webchat, on the other hand, is easy to implement. And it’s even easier to manage because it consolidates all your inbound leads from all channels into one inbox. Webchat makes it much easier to multitask while having a text conversation than managing other forms of communication and eliminates the need for dedicated staff.
Webchat’s platform also provides insightful data that can help you make pivotal improvements (especially to your landing pages):
- You can track inbound leads to review invites sent.
- You can easily see which online lead sources (Facebook, Webchat, and Google Click-to-Message) are resulting in purchases.
- You can see where the customer was on the website when they had a question (including their entire website viewing history and what page they messaged you from). Most live chats can’t do this.
Other features include:
→Google Analytics. You can track Webchat performance through Google Analytics integration.
→Multi-Location Transfers. You can easily transfer conversations from one business location to another.
→Daily Digest Emails. You can track Webchat performance with a daily report of new inbound website leads.
→Leaderboard. You can see and compare each employee’s response times and conversations managed.
Another plus? Normally, businesses should respond to chat messages as quickly as possible. But because texting opens an ongoing conversation, you have a little more flexibility. Your chat doesn’t have a time limit like it does when it’s confined to a browser.
How Webchat Automates Effectively
Most live chats rely heavily on automations, which results in a frustrating user experience. Podium’s Webchat facilitates a hybrid automation and human experience with technology that aids, rather than hampers, the buyer’s journey. We only encourage the use of automations when it’s good for you and your customer.
With Podium’s Webchat,
- You can use AI to answer FAQs with personalizable, customizable messages. If the consumer asks a question that requires live assistance as the conversation continues, Webchat’s system can trigger an alert to let you know that an employee needs to respond back.
- You can tie your automations directly to your CRM. This allows you to set up messages that are automatically personalized with information such as customer names, preferences, and history.
- You can integrate Webchat’s robust platform with many different solutions so that you can automate things like scheduling appointments over text.
- You can customize and personalize out-of-office auto responders that let customers know your business will follow up when you’re open. Chatting only during business hours increases human feel and generally ensures that only serious buyers are contacting you, saving you time.
Get Started with Webchat
Podium’s Webchat is the most convenient, personal, efficient website chat solution out there. It helps you by offering you more flexibility, saving you time, freeing up your employees, providing you with helpful data, and vetting your leads. More importantly, it helps your customers by automatically connecting them to employees who can help them through text, providing unparalleled convenience, and facilitating a highly personalized, high-quality customer experience.
With most live chats, only one party wins—you or your customers. But our Webchat solution creates a win-win scenario and makes it possible for you to capture more leads, manage them more efficiently, and convert customers for life.
Ready to start converting your website visitors and seeing insane business growth? Add Webchat to your site here.
