What is Live Chat Support?
Customers can have real-time conversations with support agents via live chat. Customers can ask questions and receive a quick response from a representative using live chat software embedded in a website.
The use of live chat software goes beyond customer support. For example, it can be used to facilitate sales conversations. Live chat software designed for customer service may have additional key features, such as integrations with shared inboxes and knowledge bases.
Live Chat Is A Great Way To Get Support
Why offer Live Chat Support to Your Customers? Customers love a live chat! Live chat is the most popular support method, with the highest customer satisfaction.
Consider the following live chat support benefits that live chat can bring to your business when deciding whether or not it's the best choice.
Customers Get Better Support With Live Chat
Live chat enables consumers to get quick answers to their queries. Live chat allows customers to contact you when they need help or have a question. It's much more convenient than emailing a customer support team. You never know when they'll respond. Live chat is more popular than any other type of customer support because of the speed of receiving relevant help content.
Customer Acquisition And Onboarding Are Easier With Live Chat
Live chat can be a powerful tool to engage with new and prospective customers and to give them the assurance they need to purchase your products or use your website.
A study says that consumers who chat with you are more likely than others to buy your product. Being available can build trust even if customers do not need immediate assistance.
Your Agents Can Build Relationships With Your Customers Through Live Chat
Agents can adjust their style to suit the customer by observing his tone of voice and emotion. Agents can build rapport quickly by matching a customer's style or changing formality. The messaging platforms are a better way than the traditional communication channels to show off your agent's personality.
If You Offer Live Chat, Customers Will Be Less Likely To Repeat Their Purchases
Nobody wants to be asked to repeat the problem they are having. Customers expect agents to have their information, including product and support histories.
Agents can also review other information they may have at their disposal. It may be possible to see the screen the customer is viewing or internal notes about previous customer service interactions.
Some customer service tools allow agents to send screenshots and links to customers during a live chat to clarify everything.
Your Customer Service Team Will Be More Productive With Live Chat
The use of live chat can also improve the efficiency of your customer support agents. Chat allows a user to handle multiple tasks at the same time.
If they are answering quick questions and don't need much research, handling five simultaneously is possible.
Because features and chat handling differ for each software, choose one that best suits your team and workflow. Look for software that allows you to handle chats, email, and all other support social channels in a single tool. This will allow your agents to focus on one area and complete their work.
You Can Provide Support 24/7 With Live Chat
Live chat support is available anytime, even 24/7 - if it's beneficial for your business.
Your consumers won't have much reason to be upset if their queries are unanswered. Suppose you don't have enough staff to run a chat 24/7. In that case, your other self-service options, like your knowledge base with content on your product, are available anytime.
If you don't offer chat, ensure your customers can easily find the support documents. While many people want to do it themselves, they don't know where to find the necessary information. Your customers will be cared for no matter what time of day or night they need support.
Customer Engagement Increases With Live Chat
You'll see an increase in interactions when you offer live chat. This growth may come from customers switching to chat over email/phone support. However, some will also be people finding chat and realizing they can get help without giving up or ditching the product with helpful tools.
Increased consumer engagement allows you to create a positive impression on your customers and give them a reason for staying. Set up the chat tool to display agent photos and names (if you can) and use a conversational style.
You Can Gain An Advantage Over The Competition By Using Live Chat
You can earn your rivals' business if they don't provide live chat or low-quality service. Consider this scenario: If you had to choose between two similar products in a rush, would you call customer service to ask questions, or would you prefer to use the company's website?
The majority of people prefer to chat with a company than to call them. More than half of customers prefer to chat rather than call for support.
Live Chat Helps In Product Decision-Making
The data you collect when providing customer service via chat can be a major benefit. Depending on the live chat software you use, you should be able to organize and tag conversations to make them easier to review.
You can help your customer service team and your marketing and product teams by committing the time to review and sort your chats.
As a starting point, create a list of tags that all agents can use and ask them to tag their chats. Tags can identify issues such as feature requests, bugs, and question types.
You can identify areas in your product where you may want to update it or provide more documentation for your customers.
Live Chat: 5 Tips For Success
Chat is an excellent way to increase support for your growing company, but you must plan well to make it work. Your team can be successful immediately with some preparation and knowing where to start.
Use these best live chat practices to ensure a smooth live chat launch.
Chat Support Is Limited At The Start
It's like managing the flow of water. You'll have a lot of chat conversations if you put a widget on every page.
Be strategic in choosing which pipelines you will open. Begin with an important page for your business where the impact of allowing chats will be greatest. It could be your pricing page, checkout page, or help center.
The chat option's location depends on your goals for implementing a chat.
- First, if you only want to help existing customers, try showing only the chat widget for logged-in users.
- Start by displaying only chat on the pricing page to drive conversions.
Save Articles From The Knowledge Base And Their Saved Responses To The Plan
Prepare resources that your teams can deploy with a single click. Two resources are essential for chats to be more efficient: a comprehensive knowledge base and saved response time with subtle chat solutions with additional costs in customer profiles via vital chat metrics in acceptable team time to solve complex issues.
The knowledge base is an online collection of guides and how-to articles for your product. The articles in the knowledge base should give step-by-step directions on performing common tasks within your product. They should also include screenshots, GIFs, and videos.
Ensure That Customer Information Is Readily Accessible
Integrating your data with your chat software lets you get a full picture of the person you are helping. More information will allow you to have a better conversation, whether from your CRM tool, your product analytics software, or even your help desk.
With these two bits of information in hand, you are ready to approach Sam and help him convert into a paying client and follow up on any previous concerns.
Read More: Why Choosing Arion ERP is The Smartest Choice for your Business?
Only Offer Chat Support When It Is Possible
It's a common myth that chat is only possible if the user is available 24 hours a day. This is not true. It's more about setting expectations and telling customers how to reach you when you can't.
Consider the volume of chats throughout the day and whether there are enough customer service representatives to handle the demand. When most of your customers are browsing the internet, staff up chat. If volume drops, agents can be moved from the chat to other tasks or work towards zero inboxes.
Agents can manage two to five talks at once when skilled and at ease. Instead of having four agents manage four chats, having one agent serve four clients is preferable.
Remember that not every problem should be resolved via live chat. It may be better to email the client if you want to include a developer to triage bugs.
Establish clear paths for escalation to save both your and your customers' time.
Live Chat Is The Preferred Way To Support Your Customers
Chat support can be so efficient that encouraging more clients to use chat instead of phone or email is often worthwhile. Remove your number from any pages that have a chat widget. Promote chat as a fast and easy way to contact support.
Live Chat Can Be A Great Way To Improve Customer Service
It's not a decision to be taken lightly. You will often be using your current resources (your staff, their hours of work, and the skills they possess) to provide help in more places. This can feel like a lot of work.
Consider these factors before you offer live chat services everywhere.
- To whom will you provide live chat assistance? It is unnecessary to offer a chat to every visitor or customer to your website. You might offer live chat support to VIP customers or newly-onboarded clients.
- When is live chat the most useful? Is there a pinch point in your sales funnel or app where a live conversation could help users get unstuck? At first, consider providing live chat only during those times.
- What is the best way to balance all your channels of support? Consider how much time you have available and what skills you possess, then decide how many hours live chat can cover. Comparing that with the support you receive through other social media channels will help you decide on an appropriate mix. You will unlikely get it exactly right on the first try, but you could make a good guess.
- What integration will you have with your help desk, CRM, or live chat? You can provide better customer service if you know your past customer interactions. Select a tool for live chat that allows you to connect every chat with the information you have about a customer. This will ensure that you do not lose any valuable context.
- Which training and resources do you require? Help your larger team succeed by reviewing each member's skills, backgrounds, and experience and giving them some advice on how to provide good chat support. Live chat requires a completely different set of skills than phone or email support.
When you begin integrating your live chat channel with your existing live chat support system, start collecting data to see what works, how your customers react, and where additional support is needed.
Quality service is more than just providing correct information. It's about understanding the customer and working with them to accomplish their goals.
Live chat can speed this process up by using a conversational approach. A skilled agent can ask the correct questions and direct the customer in the best direction.
With the right live chat software, you can combine real-time support via chat with email and self-service support. This allows for various support options based on your customers' needs and your support team's abilities.
Customers Are More Satisfied With Live Chat
It is evident that, given a choice, customers prefer real-time options like chat or phone support over social media or email.
It makes intuitive sense; why wait for an immediate answer when you can immediately have one? Live chat embedded in your website allows you to stay focused on the task at hand rather than having to stop and make a call or email.
Live chat interactions also result in higher satisfaction among customers. Data shows that customers instant satisfaction with live chat is 85%, which places it second behind phone support (91%) but ahead of help center articles (85%), email support (82%), Twitter support (81%), Facebook support (74%).
Chat support gives you a lot of control. Remove the widget if the volume is too high. When more employees are available, start proactive chats with people who've been looking at a certain page or the help center on your website for some time. You decide how much time your chat team spends.
You can expand the chat service to include more clients as your team becomes more confident.
It's Not Always Necessary To Have More Speed
According to a report that examined more than 56,000,000 live chats. It found that, on average, 46 seconds passed between a client submitting a chat request for a chat and receiving the first response from an agent.
This may seem high at first glance. However, it found that companies with longer wait times are more satisfied with their customers than organizations with shorter real time.
What is happening? The companies taking longer to reply are likely providing better-quality answers. In every case, a top-quality response delivered in a few minutes will be more helpful than a quick and unhelpful answer.
Live chat support is all about responsiveness, but it's unnecessary to give an immediate answer to make a great experience. They don't care if they have to wait longer for quality support.
The Chat Is An Opportunity To Have A Real Conversation With Your Clients
A report from the same company found that chats with companies with satisfaction ratings above 90% lasted an average of 11 minutes and 47 seconds. The average chat duration for those with lower scores was 8 minutes 42 seconds.
This may seem like a lot of time, depending on how you've experienced support. Isn't the point of live chat to get quick, concise answers? Yes, but it's not the only way. You can have an online conversation that would have normally taken you days via email in 10 to 15 minutes.
It's unnecessary to strive for the fastest possible customer service interaction to achieve true satisfaction.
You Can Sell More With Live Chat
It can be very helpful for customers to have someone available when they are ready to complete an action or transaction. According to a survey, "69% U.S. adults who shop online prefer retailers with consistent service online and off."
People are reluctant to call a customer service representative to ask questions when shopping online. As far back as 2010, 44% of internet users said, "Having questions addressed by a real person in the middle of an online transaction is the most important advanced feature a website could offer."
A study found that live chat increased online sales for 40% of those who used it (compared to 22% who never chatted), and 38% reported that they made their purchases because of chat thus a live chat software is very vital to businesses these days.
How To Add Live Chat Support As An Option
The next step after gaining the support of your customers to add live chat is to roll it out. Our best tips to add live chat support to your customer care mix are:
- Live chat is not for everyone considering where live chat's unique advantages will have the greatest impact. Your VIP clients may enjoy live chat, as it is a special option. Or your sales team may love talking to new prospects.
- It's not necessary to provide live chat assistance 24/7/365. Instead, set your chat times to a reasonable level and display them so customers can know what to expect.
- Live chat may not be the best channel to use for all questions. Sometimes, a phone call or email is more appropriate. Transiting customers from one channel to another is much easier if your live chat is integrated with your helpdesk. This will automatically generate support emails based on chat conversations.
- Allow your support staff to focus solely on one support channel. Support professionals can find it difficult to switch between different support channels, such as email or phone. This is especially true if there are two or more simultaneous chats.
To avoid burnout, assign a live chat representative or rotate the duty among your support staff to ensure you have enough time to address other needs.
Self-Service And Chatbots Are All About Quick Help
For many companies, true AI-answers-my-customers chatbot technology isn't a practical option for real customer service depending on chatbot capabilities. Sometimes, it works well for larger companies with more data and budgets.
Report that chatbots that can answer questions fully received slightly higher ratings (85.8%) than live agents who had to take over a conversation after the chatbot functionality failed to do so.
This finding could be because customers are more annoyed by being transferred than by the bots. According to a recent survey, 29% of customers find scripted responses impersonal in live chat.
Self-service material of high quality is another way to assist customers in getting answers fast. Tightly integrated with comprehensive knowledge bases, live chat tools can provide a powerful support experience.
Conclusion
Live chat is a must-have tool for organizations and businesses of any size or industry. Expect a significant increase in conversion rates for customers. Suppose the software is used across the entire corporate process. In that case, it will enhance customer service and improve the overall customer experience. Clients will expect faster responses as more companies move their operations online.
This expectation is expected to continue increasing, especially with the increase in businesses moving online. Live chats will allow users to have real-time conversations and better understand. It also provides services for its clients and builds connections with business customers.
Get in touch with the best live chat support software service . In order to implement the most efficient system for your organization.
