How To Grow Revenue and Improve Customer Service with Live Chat & Text
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Did you know? An astounding 58% of Americans say they’ll switch companies due to poor customer service. People expect to have a great experience with brands and when they don’t get it, they’ll quickly jump ship to a competitor.
When you deliver exceptional customer support, it promotes higher customer retention rates. And it can potentially drive more new business to your HVAC company. The numbers prove it—93% of customers are likely to buy again from companies with excellent customer service (source: Hubspot.com). And 38% say they’re more likely to recommend a company with good customer service (source: qualtrics.com).
The easiest way to empower growth and improve overall customer experience—without adding to your overhead—is through human-powered live chat and text services. By leveraging live chat and text, you’re essentially creating a 24/7/365 customer service desk. This keeps your business running smoothly while converting web traffic into happy—and paying—customers.
Let’s explore the benefits of using live chat and text messaging, and how to successfully add it not just to your customer experience strategy, but also your sales process.
The Basics: What Is Live Chat & Text?
Live chat and text is like a digital customer service desk. Likely, you’ve used them on websites and applications to ask a question or deal with a problem. Some chat systems are proactive and pop up on your screen, while others require you to initiate them.
Unlike a chatbot, humans operate live chat and text solutions.
4 Key Benefits to Live Chat & Text For Your HVAC Business
1: Improve Customer Experience
Offering a better customer experience is possible when you’re accessible. With live chat and text, your customers can reach out to you whenever they need assistance and they’ll get a resolution quickly, which we all know is essential in our industry. You can also use your live chat and text system to gather feedback and insights to enhance your products and services, or even build a knowledge base to reduce the need for live support. By adding live chat and text, you’re giving your customers fast responses and a person who not only understands their problem, but is also able to effectively provide a solution.
2: Build Your HVAC Brand’s Reputation
When your customer service experience is positive, it positions your brand as a go-to in the HVAC industry. Word spreads quickly when customers leave positive reviews about your company. One report shows 94% of American consumers will recommend a brand with very good customer service. Yet, only 13% of consumers will recommend a business with very poor customer service. (source: qualtrics.com)
3: Increase Your Revenue Potential
Great customer service impacts your revenue growth. If people are willing to leave to a competitor due to poor service, then it leaves brands vulnerable. By offering live chat and text, you can enhance the customer experience, which will lead to higher customer retention and more potential prospects (thanks to positive reviews and recommendations). You can also improve your lead conversion rate, as agents can proactively secure business from inquiries that come through your website or text number, turning digital traffic into happy—and paying—customers. Both impact your revenue positively. One report shows 30% of companies saw a 5% to 10% increase in revenue within one year of using live chat and text. (source: zoho.com)
4: Enhance the Efficiency of Your Operations
One of the pet peeves customers have with the client experience is having to repeat themselves over and over. With live chat and text, you reduce repetition for both your customers and support reps or administrative staff. Live chat and text allows multitasking to accelerate the time it takes to get to each customer. They can even speak to several customers at once if the questions aren’t too advanced.
Using Live Chat and Text To Grow Revenue without Increasing Overhead
Traditionally, when an HVAC company wanted to increase revenue, it needed to hire more people. Unfortunately, this also increased overhead costs to cover the additional salaries and benefits. Fortunately, there are now services that help with both— growing revenue and reducing overhead costs. Outsourced live chat and text services give you access to expert sales and customer service reps at a fraction of the cost of in-house employees. With their assistance, you can witness higher customer retention and more closed deals. This also enables your technicians and in-house teams to focus on their specialties.
While enterprise businesses often leverage outsourced live chat and text, you don’t have to be a large corporation to benefit from doing so. In our research, we found that 74% of companies had fewer than 10 employees when they first adopted live chat and text.
Build a More Qualified Sales Pipeline
HVAC customers want—and oftentimes need!—fast assistance. But they also want to speak to representatives who speak their language and can offer the best help. With live chat and text, you’re getting a team of salespeople who understand your business and services, and your customers’ needs.
Live chat agents will study your target customer to identify the best leads to target and which sales tactics to employ to close more deals. Note, that they should also be bilingual to accommodate Spanish and English-speaking customers in order to reach more people.
Thanks to their expert support skills, you’ll also have an increased chance of turning customers into long-term brand advocates and returning clients.
Expand Your Operating Hours
Customers need assistance right when an air-conditioning or heating problem occurs. If your customer service team goes home at the end of the workday, then you risk losing potential and existing customers who need after-hours help.
With live chat and text services, you’ll expand your hours of operation, so customers can receive support 24-7/365, even on holidays.
Provide Help with Efficiency and Empathy
Adding a human touch to your customer experience can turn a potentially horrible experience into a delightful one. But this is only possible when you have actual people managing your customer service.
Imagine a customer reaching out to your business to complain about a broken HVAC unit. She’s a young mom with a baby at home and temperatures outside are 100+ degrees.
A live chat and text agent is a person who can empathize with the situation and work harder to send a technician to the home to repair the unit quickly—these are the types of experiences that make a person likely to recommend your business and, more importantly, keep them coming back.
How to Implement Live Chat & Text For Your HVAC Business
Deciding to add a live chat and text function to your customer service is an excellent step toward improving your customer experience. It can enhance your company’s ability to proactively reach out to website visitors to boost sales. And it empowers customers to get help in a way that’s convenient to them.
However, integrating a live chat and text tool into your site can be challenging, depending on the platform you use.
Fortunately, there’s a simple way to add live chat and text without technical issues. By partnering with Nexa Chat, you have experts on hand to walk you through the technical aspects of setting up the technology.
We’ll give you the simple code to install the service and integrate our platform with your website and other relevant tools. Then our live agents (real people!) will begin offering customer support and sales services on your behalf.
Posted In: Customer Service, Management
