The contact form on your website will soon become obsolete.
The call to action that sits on almost every hotel website in the world is being superseded by a far more dynamic, personal medium. Live chat. How do we know this? The Umi Digital team have been rolling out live chat across a range of websites (including our own) and tracking the conversions and activity.
1. More Leads
10 times more sales leads!
Analytics across our network have shown a the more live chat conversations you get, the fewer contact form submissions you receive. Interestingly, the number of total engagements is actually close to ten times higher. This shows that people are far more willing to engage when using Live chat. That’s 10 times more sales leads for you i.e. more money in the bank in the long run.
Why might this be? Social studies are consistently showing customers’ increasing need for instant gratification. We no longer plan ahead and are typically more governed by our impulses. An example might be a customer looking to book a holiday. The customer fills out loads of email enquiry forms but when they all come back – the impulse for going on holiday might no longer be there.
The instant nature of Live chat allows a sales agent to jump in and convert the sale while the user is still in the right mindset. Moreover, most people are familiar with the mechanics of Live chat. We use it on messaging apps on our smartphones and we are also familiar with desktop equivalents such as Facebook Messenger and Skype.
2. Engage with Insight
Use data to create a highly personalised approach
Part of your sales strategy should be to ensure the barriers to enquiry are as low as possible. This has lead to contact forms becoming very short, asking the bare minimum so as not to put off the requester. As a result, when the sales agent strikes up conversation, they actually know very little about the enquirer and are therefore unable to plan and personalise the approach.
Live chat goes a long way to overcome this as it provides an opportunity to use analytics to learn a great deal about the prospect before they have even engaged. For example just the prospect visiting the website we can determine the following:
- What other websites and pages they previously visited and are currently reading
- How many times they have visited your website
- How many times they have viewed a particular page on your website
- How long their visit time is
- The exact location of their browsing session
In addition to this, we can also ask the prospect to complete a quick pre-chat questionnaire to learn even more. The result of this is that we can create a highly personalised response to anything that they ask, right down to a comment on the weather in their current location!
3. Express Your Personality
Build rapport and interact personably
Informal, conversational communication is a great way to show personality. Almost all the sales professionals I have met, particularly in the hospitality sector, favour a meeting over a phone call or an email conversation. This is because you can build rapport and interact personably, which gives the sales agent an advantage. Live chat facilitates this conversational interaction and allows us to use less formal language, emojis, short questions and more. The dialogue is therefore more dynamic and your relationship will develop faster and at a more personal level than the longer forms of written communication.
I want this on my website!
I’m not surprised! We love it. Our favourite tool has to be the one provided by LiveChat Inc. It delivers great value as it is packed full of awesome features and have a friendly team of staff behind it all. Get your 30 day free trial
If you need a hand installing it on your website, please fill out the long enquiry form on our website.. Just Kidding.. Just hit us up on live chat.