How Live Chat Can Reduce Churn on Membership-Based Websites

Websites are personal experiences. While some offer interactive tools, visitors can only click on specific elements, populate forms, read, watch, or listen to structured content. This isn't revelatory information, but it helps to frame the value websites provide. As a membership site owner, your goal is to deliver value your community finds hard to beat. 

Stuff that leaves them wanting and coming back. And that’s why live chat is way more important than most membership website owners realize.

How live chat affects churn#

Live chat helps reduce churn. It acts as a buffer, removing friction between visitors on their journey to the goal for visiting your site. 

Research into the power of live chat is telling. It shows that of the consumers who spend between $250 and $500 a month online, 63% are more loyal to companies that have live chat services. They are also more likely to be repeat customers.

Your membership website could be in a position where clients need live support. Your members could need a little guidance, just enough to help them move from "I’m uncertain" to "I’m right where I need to be" -- producing more loyal, engaged, and long-term customers.

It’s possible that you might not really see the value of live chat for your membership site just yet. You may wonder: 

• Do I really need live chat for your membership site? 
• Where do I start?

Let’s begin with why your membership site needs live chat.

The business case for live chat for membership-based websites#

Here are 4 ways that offering live chat on your member-based website can improve your business:

• Enhance Customer Engagement: Offering real-time support via live chat engages members proactively. Your brand is no longer reactive, but able to engage members with chat invitations about specific needs they might have.
• Address Concerns Immediately: Resolving issues promptly can prevent frustration and dissatisfaction that might lead to churn. 
• Build Relationships: Personalized interactions through live chat help build rapport and loyalty with members. Using unique interactions which are aligned with content a customer is viewing meets the client where they are at. Your brand is able to show up as a true supporting force. Live chat tackles client issues head-on, before they become larger, relationship-ending outcomes.
• Increasing Conversion Rates: Happy customers are long-term customers. Prospects  who engage with live chat are more likely to convert and continue their memberships because the live chat engagement offers personalized interactions coupled with swift resolutions to issues. In short, they feel seen and heard. 

Tips for implementing live chat to improve retention#

You could add live chat to your membership site and start seeing improvements in customer satisfaction. But there’s a more structured approach that offers longer-lasting and positive results.

Here are 4 fundamentals to include in your live chat service that will make each customer interaction rewarding and strengthen your brand’s retention rate.

Use jobs theory to understand your customers#

Jobs Theory was introduced by Tony Ulwick and later popularized by Clayton Christensen. It suggests that customers "hire" products or services to make progress along their path to achieve specific goals. 

This applies to every business, product and service. By focusing on the progress a customer wants to achieve, you better understand their needs, what drives your consumer’s behavior, and how to improve your offering to deliver the most value.

In a membership business, members have specific goals which you likely understand very well, including clarity on membership pricing and the value they receive. Your object is to map-out member goals, identifying what they need to realize their ideal end result.

With a clear picture of what members need, you can build live chat interactions around each member's goal.

Say you offer a membership to aspiring freelance photographers. Your research shows that members are often unaware of the kind of lenses they should own, and also don’t understand more technical terms, like aperture, or what a hot shoe is.

Your first step would be to build content pieces that explain what these are. Just as researching keywords is crucial for understanding what potential customers are searching for, live chat enables you to address members’ questions and concerns in real time. The next step would be to provide a chat pop-up that lets members know you have an entire section dedicated to  hardware and technical terms.

Build comprehensive resources for chat assistants#

The best customer support is quick, smooth, and efficient. To deliver quick, smooth and efficient support, you need to have answers readily available. 

Create a database of links, FAQs, and tasks. This should include any forms customers must complete on their own.

Access to a resource like this will help you quickly deliver answers on live chat, and resolve queries at lightning speed.

Develop your live chat team#

As with your resources, training your team is important. The more they know and understand how your business works, the quicker they can resolve issues and create the most rewarding customer experiences. 

There are other areas you can focus on, however, these are proven to deliver the most value to your members and your business: 

1. Soft skills #

Soft skills include interpersonal, communication, and listening skills, as well as time management, problem-solving, leadership, and empathy, among others. A team that’s able to identify when and how to apply these skills during member engagements will be able to address any customer concerns with elegance. 

2. Product knowledge#

Customers rely on brands to be experts on the products they sell. Your team should know all there is to know about your offerings, who they are best-suited to and why, and how they help your ideal customers. 

Knowing your products back-to-front will instill a high level of confidence in your customers too. When your team can speak with authority and confidence about how valuable your products are, they’ve able to deliver the best customer experience.

3. Sales#

Sales engagements aren’t always apparent. You’ll find that upsells and add-on opportunities avail themselves when customers express a need they can’t satisfy. Equipping your team with sales training will help them identify moments where customers express needs and how to handle these moments as sales opportunities. Sales skills will help deliver more value to your members, and more revenue to your business.

4. Internal process knowledge#

The most efficient businesses have documented standard operating procedures or SOPs. SOPs detail how systems work and what steps your team must follow to achieve a result. And this is especially important when addressing customer queries. A well-defined SOP will save time and ensure that each and every customer leaves live chats feeling satisfied.

5. Develop a quality and assurance model#

Points 1 through 4 are all about team development but without point 5, you have no way of measuring how well your business is really doing. 

Build a simple quality assurance model that reviews customer experiences and team performance. It will help find ways to improve lagging areas of your business. Most chat tools come with rating systems and chat transcript features for this purpose.

For example, JivoChat tracks agent response times, working hours, and collects KPI data on performance. It also shows you what your team’s performance looks like with graphs that indicate positive and negative customer feedback.

Live chat could transform your membership business#

Building a successful membership site is all about delivering value members can’t resist. Live chat makes it easier to create the very best customer experiences, helping you meet members where they are with timely and useful information that moves them closer to their goals.