In marketing, satisfaction and trust is the name of the game. When your clients are happy, you’re able to keep the lights on, pay your employees, and grow your business. And your clients are happy when their customers are happy. Providing those customers with a good experience throughout their purchasing process gives them a reason to come back. The more effectively and affordably you can do this, the happier your clients will be. Happy clients mean more clients, more clients mean more profits, and more profits mean you’re happy. If only it were that simple!

While marketing is always more complicated than it appears to those outside the field, technology is developing new tools to help agencies better serve their clients. One of these new tools is live chat, which can take your agency to another level by providing both your clients and your clients’ customers with a better experience. Live chat software allows operators to communicate with website visitors, answer any questions, and guide them through the purchasing process. A dedicated live chat provider handles all of the logistics for you, so you don’t have to increase staff or invest in training and analytics to provide your clients with the same service.

So now that you know what live chat is, let’s look at a few ways a live chat service provider can help your marketing agency wow your clients:

• They help drive sales by greeting website visitors with an immediate and customized response according to their inquiries. Whether a potential customer is visiting your client’s website at noon or midnight, an operator will pop up in a chat window to politely welcome them, answer any questions, and collect any pertinent information. Operators can also direct would-be customers to specific product pages and even use co-browsing to make suggestions and offer visitors a totally one-of-a-kind shopping experience. A live chat service provider can customize branding and chat scripts on a client-by-client basis. This eases visitors into the buying processand improves brand recognition. A staggering 79% of online consumers say they like live chat because it allows them to have their questions answered immediately, while 46% said it was the most efficient communication method.
• They reduce the costs of customer service relative to phones because they can serve multiple users at the same time. This reduction in staff significantly reduces overhead while providing the same level of customer service. Saving money without detracting from the customer’s experience? Talk about happy clients!
• They allow you to analyze and adapt your marketing strategy through both the information contained in chat logs, as well as through integrated tracking data and analytics. Perhaps the biggest selling point of a live chat service is that it can generate a large amount of actionable data about website visitors, from monitoring them in real time to tracking what websites they came from and which search terms, on which engine, they used to find your site. This can be used to guide SEO strategy, which in turn leads to increased online sales.

 Live chat, especially when conducted by specialized services, is at the forefront of improving the online consumer experience. As more and more business and commerce drift online, marketing agencies need to respond by staying ahead of the curve. By providing your clients with actionable data and helping to drive sales — all at an affordable price — your agency will look even better than it already does.