One of the most frustrating parts of seeking support as a customer is the wait on the end of the line for your call to be picked up by an agent at the help desk. That symphony music on repeat being interrupted to let you know that ‘none of our agents are available’. In turn the longer a customer waits, the more your value drops after their expected waiting time has passed. The wait for an email response can be equally as unsatisfying. This is where Live chat can come into play.
If a customer can get a direct answer to their query then and there, it will cut down waiting time for them and less pressure on the call centre queue. Rather than customers clicking away from your support portal in frustration from waiting to have their simple question to be answered or hanging up the phone after waiting too long, introduce them to the option of a live chat.
Convenience for Customers
An online chat system provides customers immediate access to help. Wait times are often much less than a call centre, and customers can easily multi-task while waiting. Additionally, the pain of having to dial a support number and navigate through a maze of numeric options is non-existent.
Improved Customer Service and Loyalty
Customers can ask their question on live chat and leave their live chat window open in the background in anticipation for your speedy response.
To help you get a better understanding of how much customers appreciate access to live chat, consider the eDigital Customer Service Benchmark survey of 2000 consumers that found that live chat had the highest customer satisfaction levels at 73%, as compared to 61% for email support and only 44% for traditional phone support.
With numbers like these, it’s easy to see why customers return to businesses that provide live chat. Simply put, customers feel more confident doing business with companies that make support easy, hassle free and instantaneous.
Live chat allows you to solve problems faster, give quick answers to questions about your products and provide assurance to your customers that you’re there when they need you. This is a simple, yet very effective, recipe for improving both customer service and loyalty.
Tips on Making Live Chat go the Extra Mile for Your Business
Live chat can obviously increase your business potential, but only if it’s executed correctly. Here are some important tips to ensure you make the most out of live chat software:
- Train your team! Your live chat representatives must be extremely knowledgeable about your product and service. Provide cheat sheets and FAQs to improve their performance and to make it easier for them to answer your customer’s questions quickly.
- Be Aware of your business hours. If you have mainly of local customers it should be sufficient to provide support on the regular business hours. On the other hand if you have a lot of international customers it may be worth looking into extending your business hours with additional staff to cater for these hours of business that your international customers will be active during and requiring your help. All in the task of providing the upmost customer service to each of your customers.
- Don’t be too robotic. The whole point of having live chat available is to provide warm, human help to a customer’s shopping experience. Having robotic greetings or responses can kill the effectiveness of live chat.
- Don’t forget to boost your social. When your live chat representatives receive positive feedback from online visitors and customers, consider instructing your representatives (or sales people) to nicely remind your visitors to Like your Facebook page and leave a comment on it.
- Be prepared for surges in chat volume. Customers need to understand that they are in a queue and a representative will be with them shortly, if not immediately.
Want to learn more about Live Chat support tools and how to get it on your site? Read MobileMonkey’s article here.
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