Virtual chats have become a number-one tool 🔨 in customer communication, allowing brands to communicate with clients on the spot. This elevates customer service to another level, leading to increased customer satisfaction 😄, sales conversion, and a cost cut.
Did you know that more than 79% of clients prefer to support via live chat channels with the aim of getting instant interactions to their questions? 🤔
Therefore, implementing a live chat feature is more than a way of improving customer satisfaction and retention and management of the feature will also result in other advantages.
In this article, we will show you the best practices for online customer service in live chat 💬, which not only enables you to minimize customer abandonment but also gives you enormous opportunities to improve customer satisfaction.
🔑 KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- Live chat is a communication tool that allows customers to talk directly with real human support employees in real-time.
- Live chat is a technology that has been primarily used for marketing, sales, and customer support.
- Businesses use live chat because it helps them communicate in real time, multitask, and get better returns on investments.
- When using a live chat service, you should implement best practices like keeping response time low, using AI chatbots, keeping a human touch, communicating effectively, using tags to manage conversations, and more.
What is Live Chat?
Live chat is a real-time communication tool that allows customers to talk directly with real human support employees. It essentially provides a chat window embedded in a website or app, allowing customers to ask questions, get help, or engage with the company directly.
Live chats are mostly implemented as code on specific pages of a website. This allows organizations to designate pages where they want to offer live chat support. It is to be noted that both live chat and chatbot are instant-response helpdesk tools, but live chat employs human agents, while chatbot is a bot.
Live Chat Best Practices: Why Are Businesses Implementing Them?
Businesses develop fresh solutions to meet customer service requirements. One way of doing that is implementing an effective live chat secret that will greatly impact the factors mentioned below.
Live Chat is Real-Time.
Using the best live chat software enables a business to communicate with its customers in real-time, solve their issues quickly, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction. Businesses get the opportunity to intensify their relationship with customers and improve overall satisfaction by using it during the first interaction.
This real-time communication channel is not only essential for responding to customer queries immediately but also increases the retention rate.
Live Chat is Multi-Tasking.
Businesses and individuals alike can greatly improve their efficiency and productivity in customer support by smartly utilizing live chat platforms. This is especially beneficial for agents, as they can handle multiple conversations simultaneously.
This will shorten response times, which in turn will lower customers’ average waiting time for help.
Better Return on Investment.
With live chats, businesses practically assure a more profound impact of instant replies, thereby leading to higher sales and a first-class experience for consumers. The website incorporates a responsive live chat tool.
In this way, a business that uses these solutions effectively will reduce the average queue time and respond faster to customer inquiries.
15 Live Chat Best Practices for Effective Customer Service
The incorporation of live chat customer service systems into the business’s support system will allow it to upgrade communication with its clients and maintain consistent support through every client connection.
We will provide you with a list of best practices for communicating with customers online to boost their satisfaction and increase brand credibility.
1. Place Your Live Chat Option Strategically.
Positions for the live chat button are the one that starts the conversation. That means you should place it in the best area if you need your customers to start a chat. The live chat button is supposed to be accessible but not excessively conspicuous.
Here, we suggest choosing bright colors so that customers’ attention is directed towards the live chat option without them exhausting the whole page by looking around.
The most popular position for a web visitor to put a live chat display button is supposedly the bottom right corner. This positioning simply imitates the natural eye movement to the side of the screen that our users usually move to when they open a new tab on a website.
2. Keep Response Times Low.
Live chat, one of the favorite means of communication for customers, offers instant responses, a feature they cannot experience with others that require longer waiting periods. This functionality makes both end users and support agents successful by enabling the support agents to concurrently serve multiple conversations without having to place customers in a queue for long.
The speed of a live chat when talking to customers immediately becomes useless if these customers are put in the waiting queue. On the one hand, this leads to a wrong impression of the customer, while on the other, it deteriorates the brand image.
One of the best ways to reduce the response time is to provide customers with operating hours information. This approach allows customers to quickly see if you are available, and therefore, they can suit their expectations.
3. Use Co-browsing Sessions.
Co-browsing is an amazing tool which gives supervisors the ability to see agent screens in real time which helps in guiding and assisting them more effectively. Businesses can thus create an interface that is clear and direct and will help them to give better customer experience and improve resolution times by integrating co-browsing or screen sharing into live chat.
Co-browsing makes things easier, especially for complex issues that are hard to close with a simple text description. Rather than describing the whole thing verbally or through the text, you can guide the customers step by step during the process of complex tasks.
In this way, the dialogue is more interactive and feels as if you are actually meeting someone in person, especially if voice calling is also used.
4. Track Your Metrics.
Tracking your live chat metrics makes it possible to assess your service level and quantify how well your live chat is going compared to your benchmarks. By tracking the right metrics, you can tell how the team delivers against your KPIs and show you the areas that are strong and the areas that need to be worked on.
Setting your goals on repeat means you can make on-the-spot adjustments to your clients’ live chat experience and raise the team’s efficiency. On the other hand, the data gathered from the chats can be used to train your agents to handle the specific problems that customers face most frequently in the right way.
5. Use AI Chatbots.
In the same way as AI meeting notes are used in the company’s office proceedings, chatbots work with agents to gather details from the customer before transferring the call to the right support agent. AI bots run on this principle of comparing users’ queries to their common phrases and keywords and then advising from the next step.
A virtual PBX helps demonstrate to everyone that direct contact with clients can be possible no matter the business. Using different channels, you can fuse live and automation, making it easier for customers to get your support at the time and place of their choice.
6. Take The First Step.
As one of the main components of customer care, quick and efficient handling of customer issues and complaints is the top priority of all businesses. Details are the foundation of this, so it is important to be prepared beforehand rather than after a problem arises.
A straightforward way to aim at being proactive is to take the first step yourself and put a live chat button on a website so that the users can accessible the support immediately and without any delay. This tactic is aimed at finding and fixing the problems that the users cannot easily communicate with the support team about.
Live chat is an effective way to reach customers and establish initial contact on a website by providing help and information to visitors. Besides, the effectiveness of live chat software tools can be enhanced to provide proactive customer engagement by analyzing data using data analysis and machine learning.
7. Ask Customers For Feedback.
To get useful comments from customers, enable your live chat tool to ask them to evaluate their experience post each conversation. Keep it simple by offering three options: ‘OK’, “Average” and “Bad.” This will be of great help to you in exploring the weak points and make the service even better.
Regardless of how you decide to involve your customers, it is important to acknowledge the importance of their feedback and its management. This will ultimately lead to developing stronger bonds with your clients and enhancing or increasing their satisfaction with your brand.
8. Use Tags To Manage Your Conversations.
Implement a ticket tagging system to assist the support agents in handling and allocating coming live chat messages. Tags can be used for various purposes, such as making chatting easier by categorizing chats by customer queries.
You can use tags, such as ‘open,’ ‘resolved,’ or ‘on hold,’ to enable you to be aware of conversations with various stages so that you stay organized and on point.
This function can greatly help the organization and the smoothness of personalized support. You can detect the most popular problems by grouping chats into question categories and preparing corresponding support information and answers.
9. Communicate Effectively.
Your responses should be vital to meeting customer issues and ensuring customer satisfaction at all times. To do that, we will list some actions you can take to ensure effective communication.
- Carefully read each message you receive and make sure comprehension is on the expected level.
- Respond to the customers’ queries with correct, factual information.
- Check every sentence before you hit send to avoid spelling mistakes.
- Ensure your writing is easy to grasp by keeping your sentences short and sweet with simple language.
- Make sure to always communicate positively and in a well-mannered way.
- Propose detailed solutions that address the implemented ones and tackle the problem from the root.
10. Integrate Live Chat With Your CRM.
According to Forbes, SaaS has been the most productive economic sector in recent years, and CRM software is a leading business application area. Combining a CRM system with a chat tool enables companies to provide data-driven service to their customers based on personal information such as contacts, preferences, and interaction history to eventually offer customized experiences.
Businesses can maintain customer profiles. Thus, the interactions, as well as likes and dislikes of the individual cards, are tailored to each according to needs and preferences as well as creating a seamless and personalized experience.
Once customers have a chance to continue the conversation with Salespeople again, they will not need to recall the information shared in accordance with their own preferences.
11. Maintain Human Touch.
Often, live support agents can get stuck in the same cycle of keeping the same customer happy and experiencing the same conversations all the time. Being able to Direct human-like conversations is a prerequisite for companies to apply top-rated customer service.
A personalized approach is used to raise customers’ lifetime values and exercise their joy. This strategy also exerts a positive impact on brand credibility, imprinting a mark of the company’s sincerity.
Key tips on how to create a human contact over live chat:
- Be Transparent: If live chat support agents seem unable or unable to provide the answer, they should seek experts’ advice. By recognizing the boundaries, they can transfer the matter to any specialized team member to better help customers get the necessary solutions.
- Use Your Soft Skills: Use happy and friendly words in live chat sessions to add to the positive atmosphere of the chatroom. The informality that works with friendliness greatly contributes to the lack of live chat conversations, which provokes the customer’s satisfaction and engagement.
12. Target Your Audience With The Right Triggers.
Not ignoring your returning customers is your business success strategy since they provide valuable resources. To make the most of this opportunity, proactively have two-way communication through real-time messaging with visitors.
To achieve this, utilize live chat software to understand customer journeys from a customer’s perspective. It is about dealing with the pain points and satisfying the customers by customizing the experience to suit their needs. Hence, customers enjoy more in the long run.
Consider the following common scenarios for engaging customers through targeted messaging:
- Interacting with customers without exhibiting signs of hesitation during the buying process.
- Greeting returning or loyal customers.
- Targeting customers from particular geographical areas or locations.
- Displaying personalized promotional pop-ups to relevant customers.
- Engaging customers on pages with high exit rates.
- Assisting customers in navigating FAQ pages.
- Initiating conversations when customers visit specific product pages.
13. Personalize Your Conversations With Video Chat.
Interacting with customers in a more captivating manner often leads to a stronger affinity for your brand. It’s worth noting that a significant portion of companies have yet to establish a comprehensive customer engagement strategy, instead relying on an assortment of channels and platforms.
Utilizing video calling apps can facilitate swifter problem-solving through precise issue identification and elevated customer experience. Fostering face-to-face conversations, in turn, strengthens client relationships by offering tailored customer assistance.
Here is how video chat helps as live chat support best practices:
- Enable one-click access to real-time sales and support assistance.
- Speed up issue recognition and resolution at the first point of contact.
- Enrich personalization in chat discussions, leading to improved sales conversions.
- Offer remote support and foster meaningful customer engagement.
14. Improve Resolution Time With Omnichannel Routing.
Any time when there is a new request for a call in a live chat, you can direct it to its appropriate department for a quick resolution. Queues will be less, and thus, you will significantly improve response time.
Omnichannel routing will speed up your live chat support team’s response time for any sales support. Calls are directed to the right department and the right agent, decreasing the first response time, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving your sales conversation cycle. This approach of dividing chats and calls into various departments allows you to answer customers’ questions more quickly.
15. Collect Customer Information With Pre-Chat Forms.
Collect the essential visitor materials at the beginning of each chat session by sending pre-chat surveys or forms. This will enable you to know their name, email, or customer ID immediately to cut down on the chance of asking the same questions about these things in subsequent chats. The information you’ve received guarantees the personalized attention that you give to each client.
Conclusion
Live chat is a technology primarily used for marketing, sales, and customer support. Of course, using it in your business is only successful if you follow the practices mentioned above. You are bound to get top-class customer interaction and delivery results, which your customers will love!
By applying live chat best practices, you will uphold your customers’ achievements and simultaneously enhance your business objectives. If you work virtually for your customer support team, you should use tools with live chats.
