Number One for Lead-Lift: Live Chat!

Online chat teams are a fundamental way to boost leads at your community. Chat teams not only work, they outperform chatbots, phone calls, and emails in a landslide fashion. Now let’s unpack why live chat is so vital to your community’s success.

Instant response, increased leads.

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but let me paint a little picture for you: prospects want information instantly. They can either call you, email you, or chat with a team member online. Calls typically involve pushing buttons and sitting through hold-music to get the right person. Email is lethargic and can take hours or days to get a response back. Online chat is instant. That’s pretty key considering nearly two-thirds of customers will no longer wait more than 2 minutes to receive assistance (Arise). With an experienced team that responds in a few seconds, our US-based Live Chat team has created tens of thousands of leads for happy clients.

What does instant get you?

I applaud your inquisition. The answer: satisfaction, prospect retention, and more leads. 

1. Satisfaction: Live chat has a 73% satisfaction rate as a customer touchpoint, compared to phone calls (44%), and emails (61%). Per Econsultancy

2. Prospect retention: Your prospects are not waiting on pins and needles for a callback or an email from your team, they are actively shopping around for other communities in the meantime. Instant responses mean you can engage, qualify, and convert them right away before they sign with that other community on the block.

3. Way more leads: A study by ApexChat shows a 40 percent average increase in online leads when a live chat service was implemented. Our US-based Live Chat team can heavily contribute to those lead increases given a conversation-to-lead rate of nearly 60%!

Live chat team or chatbot?

I mentioned a live chat team is much better than a chatbot. Let’s clear that up a little bit. To put things simply, people aren’t keen on interacting with a bot over a real person. Users associate a good customer experience (vital for your brand!) with a live chat team 23% more frequently than a chatbot (Marketing Charts). Here’s why:

1. Interaction: Interacting with a live chat team feels natural because it is natural. Real humans are addressing your specific needs as opposed to responses from bots that are, well, robotic. When 68% of customers leave businesses due to poor customer service, putting a bot at your front desk is not your best move (Acquire).

2. Precision: Live chat teams answer complex prospect questions that contain intricate nuances. Chat teams are trained to do this precisely and comprehensively. Chatbots, on the other hand, respond with canned responses based on the keywords that website visitors use in their queries. This leaves your prospects frustrated, feeling like they didn’t get the answers they needed.

3. Lead-gen: You wouldn’t replace your sales team with a robot and you shouldn’t replace your chat staff with robots either. Live chat teams have the end goal of transforming visitors with inquiries into a quality lead. Converting an inquiry to a lead takes a complex understanding of the inquiry in order to move the prospect towards conversion. This is an advanced behavior suited for a live team rather than a bot. Our chat team excels at moving prospects toward conversion, proven by the fact that we drive thousands of leads to our customers each year!

Sure, chatbots have some upsides. They are available around the clock, quick to respond, and they might even save you a dollar or two. Our chat team has the speed and 8 years of experience. We have fielded hundreds of thousands of inquiries and we do so in mere seconds. Saving a few extra bucks but risking a poor customer experience and fewer leads really isn’t worth it at that point.

What to do, what to do.

Get a live chat team to field questions on your site, you won’t regret it. We didn’t even have time to cover all the benefits of a live chat team, but this solution is also going to take some pressure off your onsite leasing team. 

Heck, we’re biased, but I am pretty sure we’ve got the best Multifamily and Senior Living chat team this side of the Mississippi. Here are some great results our customers get with our chat team! Start boosting leads and improving customer experience today.