How To Use Live Chat For Better Customer Experience?

To sustain in fiercely competitive environment, every company aims to offer great customer service and outshine the rivals in this aspect. Whether you are the owner of startup dealing with IT peripherals or a fast growing company with offshore expansion plans or nearshore outsourcing, you can’t overlook the importance of offering superb customer service. Until a few years back, most companies relied on using telephony and email to offer support to the customers. However, fast evolving internet technologies have made things easier and better for the businesses. Like many other companies, you should think of incorporating live chat in the brand website for offering top notch customer support.

Importance Of Live Chat In Enhancing Customer Support Standard:

Of course, it is not without credible and solid reasons that thousands of businesses across the world are embracing live chat to provide customer support. Usage of live chat in your company website helps improve quality of customer support by several notches. It makes things easier to manage for the support agents and the customers get more flexibility for resolving their issues and queries eventually. By deploying live chat in company website, productivity can be improved and operational costs can be reduced in long run. However, it is important that you know the ways to make the most out of live chat software for organizational benefits.

Listed below are the tried and tested ways to utilize live chat and offer overall better experience to the customers:

• • Query resolution minus hassles- Not all the customers contacting the customer care section are irate or have grievances. There will be others who will contact to get answers to their queries. The queries can be on various subjects including a promotion or any product. Resolving queries over email can be time consuming and congestion in telephone lines can make customers annoyed. However, when they use live chat, query resolution becomes faster and simplified. The customers can read exactly what is typed by the support agents and there is no risk of miscommunication or hearing something else, which can happen with telephonic support.
  • Engaging site visitors effectively- Live chat can be deployed as a powerful weapon to engage site visitors. Modern live chat software can be customized to pop up with suitable greeting messages based on visitor behaviors. In many instances, engaging site visitors with useful information like promotional offers or signup bonus can lead to orders and conversion to customers.
  • Making customers feel important and valued-While expanding customer base of the company is important, you also need to focus on keeping the existing customers happy. For this, it is necessary to make the customers feel privileged in various ways. The live chat software applications can be integrated with the company’s customer database. This ensures whenever an existing customer uses the applications his or her details are retrieved automatically by the live chat app from linked database. When the customers are greeted by name by the agents, they feel good. Apart from name and address of the customers, purchase history is also saved in the database which can be used by the agents. Apart from making the customers feel good, this helps in saving time for both sides.
  • No more making the customers wait- This is the age when everyone wants instant solutions- be it for preparing dinner or troubleshooting an Android phone. Do you think your customers will like to wait for long when they contact the customer support section of your company for any need? They also want quickest possible solutions to their grievances or answers to queries. Nothing is faster than live chat in this aspect. It takes less time to initiate compared to other means like email and phone. The agents can respond to the customers within a short span of time.
  • Greeting customers with suitable messages- The IVR messages are mostly pre recorded and most customers calling your company’s help line number may get bored listening to those! However, live chat software can be used to greet the site visitor and returning customers with fitting messages. The messages displayed at chat window can be customized as per events and timings.

• Helping customers troubleshoot issues in simple way- A section of customers like to troubleshoot problems on their own but they can contact the customers care section for guidance. This can be for fixing software glitches and other issues. This can be not so easy when the agents are trying to aid the customers over phone. The customer may skip a step in troubleshooting or find the language too technical etc. In live chat, this issue is not present. The agents can use simple word based guidelines which can be easily comprehended by the customer. Moreover, the agents can use diagrams and screenshots in live chat window.
• Understanding needs of customers clearly- Sometimes, the agents may fail to understand specific needs of the customers while conversing over phone. The agents may miss out parts of the sentences and end up responding with answers that fail to resolve queries of the customers. This can lead to unnecessary delay in resolving the matter and the concerned customer will get irate too. However, this problem does not crop up if Live chat is there. The agents can go through words of the customers easily and figure out their needs precisely. Eventually, this leads to enhanced customer satisfaction.
• Overcoming barriers of language easily- You seriously cannot expect all customers of your company to be proficient in English. Handling issues of customers speaking other languages than English can be hard over the phone and you have to recruit agents with multilingual skills. When the agents use live chat, this issue is hardly problematic. The agents can use online translator software can chat with such customers without problems or delay.
• Calming irate customers through Live chat- Sometimes, the support agents have to deal with customers who have lost their cool. The customer can become irate for any reasons including delay in receiving their query or some serious issues in products and services etc. Using live chat, the agents can calm down such customers. They can resort to using empathetic tone and offer discounts and other freebies to make the customers see reason.
• Getting to know the choice of customers- Live chat software is not only meant for addressing customer grievances and resolving product queries! The agents can make use of the software to learn about choices of individual customers. Think of a situation when a customer has pinged to voice grievance about services or products. The customers may also ping for query resolution. After addressing the issue, the agents can ask that customer his/her feedbacks on similar products and preferences. Later the feedback can be used for planning promotions.
• Retaining buyers more conscious about privacy- In an era when news of MNCs facing serious security breaches and profiles of celebs getting hacked is commonplace, your company’s customers are likely to become more conscious about data safety. Usage of Live chat is ideal if you want to satisfy privacy aware customers. These customers find it more suitable to type in their private data in chat window compared to speaking over phone.