You’re making a cost reduction strategy. You’ve already automated time-consuming admin tasks. You’ve contacted your suppliers and got some good deals. But what about customer service?
Naturally, while you want to cut costs, you don’t want to scrimp on customer experience quality. Enter live chat software.
Live chat helps reduce costs without threatening the customer experience. It can even further growth at the same time.
So, here’s why chat should be part of your cost reduction strategy.
Efficiency of concurrency
A common adage states that time = money. If that’s the case, then, it follows that wasted time = wasted money. So, part of your cost reduction strategy will focus on reducing wasted time. In other words, driving efficiency and productivity.
Efficiency is the first area in which live chat can support your cost reduction strategy.
Chat is an incredibly efficient method of customer communication. This is because unlike other methods of support, your agents can help more than one customer at a time, with concurrent chats.
And they can do so in real-time — meaning no waiting for replies and additional information.
This means that you need fewer team members — and less time — to offer the same level of support.
As a result, you free up your team members to handle other tasks that further your growth. (And so get more for your money.)
Real-time productivity
The potential of chat as part of your cost reduction strategy doesn’t stop at concurrent support either. Live chat software has a host of features that boost (cost-reducing) productivity, too.
For instance, canned responses, predictive chat, AI auto-text, and so on. These kind of chat features help agents reply to customers at speed. Without, that is, wasting effort typing out the same answers again and again.
Meanwhile, real-time sentiment analysis assures the agent that they’re responding empathetically. There’s no need to spend time decoding the mood behind the messages.
So, you’ve reduced costs, but not quality.
Self-service and chatbots
Another key area for a customer service cost reduction strategy lies with self-service options. Having good self-service material on your website means fewer customers need agent support.
Live chat can help here, too, with the integration of a chatbot operator.
A chatbot acts as an inexpensive agent that can support your cost-reducing self-service section. It can do this by directing customers to the relevant self-support materials for their needs.
Plus, as another channel of self-service before reaching out to your team, a chatbot can also handle the tedious and repetitive issues.
This means more fulfilling work for your team, which in turn can help to reduce costly team churn.
An inexpensive translation option
When paired with machine translation, chat offers an inexpensive way to offer multilingual support. Real-time chat translation lets your agents talk to any of your customers, no matter their language abilities.
So, you reduce the cost of supporting more of your customers. After all, you don’t need an offshore call centre or pricey outsourced customer service.
Reduce costs, not quality
Live chat is cheaper than calls, offers more time-saving features than email, and helps customers help themselves.
As part of your cost reduction strategy, then, it helps you cut the costs of customer support. All without impeding quality.
Why not see how chat fits with your cost reduction strategy? Try it now, with a 30-day free trial of WhosOn.