Live Chat is quickly emerging as one of the most popular and most successful customer service options. It’s lucrative for business owners, decreases shopping cart abandonment rates, and is convenient. The story is the same for so many customers: They have a question or problem, but they don’t want to go through the hassle of calling a company and potentially being put on hold or transferred to multiple representatives. Live chat can help solve this all-too-common problem with customer service. Check out the following benefits of a seamless live chat experience.
1. Customer relationship management (CRM) integration keeps things personal
CRM allows you to keep a record of important client information including names, phone numbers, email addresses, social media accounts, IP address and more in one central location. These details can be used to build client profiles and further personalize the live chat experience. It saves time and makes the agents’ jobs easier, and ultimately the clients are happy because they appreciate the personalization and recognition.
2. Live chat is fast and keeps things moving
One of the main reasons customers prefer live chat over calling customer service or visiting a store in person is because it’s fast; much faster than sitting through a drawn out phone menu, explaining a problem, and then explaining it again when the first representative doesn’t know how to answer it. With live chat, you can type out the question or issue once and then representatives on the other end can easily forward it on to another more qualified colleague if necessary without having to be put on hold or re-explain what’s going on. Live chat allows you to have questions answered, close accounts, change passwords and more within a matter of a few minutes.
3. Live chat saves your team time with easy transfers
As mentioned before, being transferred when talking to customer service on the phone is all too common. It’s just not realistic to think your first correspondence will solve your specific problem. Thanks to live chat, though, transfers no longer have to mean long periods spent repeating yourself or on hold. When you type your question or problem into the live chat box, you immediately have a written record of your concern. Then, if the first person you’re connected with can’t help you, they can quickly forward your information to another representative who is better equipped to handle the issue (which often happens without the customer even knowing about it). From a business standpoint, this also saves a lot of time and allows you to take on more customer service issues at once.
4. Live chat keeps a record of the conversation
In addition to being able to forward your questions on to others, the written records taken during live chat sessions can come in handy for other purposes. Businesses are able to keep a record of the sessions so if a customer comes back with a similar (or different) concern at another time, they have an account of the person’s information and previous experiences. This cuts down on customer anxiety and stress because they can see exactly what they’ve been told, when, and by whom, which offers an extra sense of security should there be a problem they need to explain or defend in the future.
So How Do You Create a Successful Live Chat Experience?
While the benefits of live chat are great, how do you create the seamless experience? Crafting a seamless live chat experience does take some work, but there are best practices companies can follow before, during, and after adopting live chat to make the process a little simpler. It’s worth it to put in this extra effort to make sure the process is smooth and your customers are happy—they’ll thank you in conversions and loyalty.
You can read a full article on all of the best practices here, but if you do nothing else, one key element will make all the difference: the right “chatters.”
You need to understand that your customers choose live chat over other customer service options because they want a quick, easy, personalized experience; they don’t want to have go through different channels and representatives and phone menus just to get automated responses that don’t answer their question. Live chat representatives should be trained to be quick and concise and keep the customer’s wants and needs at the forefront. In addition, they should be polite, respectful, and friendly. Once these skills have been mastered you should see improvements in your sales, specifically in the number of people who don’t abandon shopping carts because of a question, concern, or glitch in technology.
What benefits have you seen thanks to a seamless live chat experience? Let us know in the comment section below.
