Introduction
Getting started with the live chat support services may sound simple, but sometimes making this sustainable can be overwhelming. Live chat service combines real-time chat with the ability to collect information, share links that make it an ideal online platform for customers who seek immediate help. Nowadays, customers are not willing to wait more than 10 minutes to resolve their queries. In this case, live chat can be a boon to them that can serve their purpose within a few minutes. However, if businesses can explore the opportunity of using live chat on their website, it is quite evident that they will result in better customer service than ever.
What Do You Mean by Live Chat Support?
Live chat support is defined as an online chat app that enables website visitors to reach your brand in real-time. It is a messaging platform where customers will be able to chat with customer service agents or a chatbot on the company’s website. This platform not only provides an instant 1:1 solution to the customers but also adds a human touch while resolving complex customer issues.
Usually, companies use live chat software embedded on the website to have text-based instant conversations with the customers either using chatbots or support teams. A real-time conversation with a customer is much helpful for converting visitors to customers as up-selling and product features can be explained in live chat easily.
Why is Live Chat Important for Your Website?
Live chat support for customer service is considered a win/win proposition for the enhanced customer journey and brand engagement. It has become one of the leading digital contact methods for online customers. Live chat customer service is likely to be 2 times more popular than email support and 3 times more likely than social channels as users find it more useful than any other communication channel and feel a better customer experience.
Customers expect support from the brands as quickly as possible. According to Customer trends report 2020, 28% of the customers expect a reply within 5 minutes of their complaint being lodged. Customers irrespective of demographic segment and age ranges love live chat services because:
- It is more convenient and quicker than a traditional voice call
- More personalized compared to an email response
- More private than any kind of social interaction
- It strengthens the customer experience for any brand
- It solves customer issues before they become bigger
- Prevent cart abandonment
- It reduces response time for resolving a customer issue
Live Chat Support Best Practices
Enhance the quality of interaction with your customers while ensuring consistent customer support by implementing the live chat support best practices across all touchpoints. Below is the list of best practices that brands can use while integrating live chat in their website for communicating with their customers online.
1. Improved Response Time
When it comes to delivering quicker customer service, nothing beats the speed of live chat support. It is the reason modern customers prefer live chat over other communication channels. With the help of canned responses, brands can improve the response time by delivering a better experience. Canned replies lead to faster responses, improve the accuracy of the response and maintain consistency in the brand reputation. Depending upon the type of business, brands can formulate canned replies beforehand for the most commonly asked queries.
2. Integrate Live Chat Window Strategically
Placing the live chat strategically on the website is very crucial so that it is visible to the customers. The best practices of live chat can be done only when a company can think like a customer by understanding their latent needs while offering contextual solutions to their issues. For instance, customer experience can be enhanced with the appropriate placement of the live chat on your different web pages. When someone views your website, their eyes should go directly to the live chat window.
3. Place Chat Window on Important Web Pages
Offering live chat assistance will yield great results only when it is embedded on the important web pages on your website. You have to find the most viewed pages of your website and integrate live chat assistance on those pages. According to the eMarketer report, 63% of the customers who have used live chat for any assistance are more likely to come for repeat purchases from the website. Sometimes, visitors might not reach your homepage, they can directly go to your product page. Hence, the live chat feature in the product pages is of utmost importance for creating a fruitful customer journey.
4. Enhanced Conversation Using AI Chatbots
Nowadays AI chatbots are proven to help organizations in improving customer engagement and boosting conversation rates. Live chat software can be easily integrated with the chatbot so that they can respond to customers whenever live agents are not available. With the help of sequence-based chatbots, companies can anticipate and respond to their customer needs by steering the conversations. Customer service agents along with chatbots can do wonders in serving customers profoundly by tracking the customer conversations.
5. Add Human Effect
Sometimes live chat agents find it overwhelming to greet customers with a positive attitude with the sheer volume of customer requests coming regularly. Human intervention can help in personalizing chat while making a connection with the customers. Customers always expect a customized approach from the company. This not only increases the customer journey mapping but also brand reputation a lot. Building trust with the customers can be possible only when intervention will add along with the AI chatbots.
6. Track Live Chat Metrics
Measuring the service level agreement is essential for quantifying the performance of the live chat using live chat metrics in terms of revenue. A company must add a few live chat metrics so that the performance of the live chat can be measured against its KPI. Performance metrics is essential as it will highlight the areas of improvement so that you can deliver excellent customer service. SLAs should be created for the customer experience while implementing them across the organizational hierarchy.
7. Integrate CRM with Live Chat
What if the customer care agents can be caught up in some urgent tasks that take them away from the live chat window? At that time if a customer comes, then the AI chatbot will not be able to provide personalized solutions that can result in the customer not coming back again. CRM helps in synchronizing customer identities including name, email id, ticket numbers, queries that help a live agent to understand the whole situation from the scratch. They can easily pick up the customer chat from where they have left. Thus, CRM helps customer service agents to create a streamlined conversation between your brand and customers.
Tags are considered as one of the most underused features by brands in the live chat support services. Tags help in categorizing the content in the chat while routing them through the most appropriate path. Observation has taught the customer service agents in categorizing sets of questions that are asked to the customers. For example, sometimes customers constantly seek help regarding configuring browsing their communication channels. So, there is a set of questionnaires that are tagged against this issue, so that the right person could help customers.
Final Take
As an emerging website must-have, live chat has immense benefits when it is used properly by any brand. Whether your company belongs to the e-commerce sector, or FMCG or FMCD, if you embed live chat support on your website, it can create wonders for your brand. If your brand is successful in providing a good quality product and instant customer service, then you can easily maintain your online reputation and create a unique customer experience easier. The numerous benefits and best practices mentioned above depict how your company can provide seamless and consistent support to your customers. The new features and integration keep the live chat software better than ever while becoming inclusive of changing customer latent needs.
