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Live chat is a fantastic tool for engaging with your customers on digital platforms like your website, mobile app, or social media channels, but here’s the catch—it’s not enough to just have it. If you are not following live chat best practices, you might be doing more harm than good.
Think this way: your customers expect effective real-time responses from your support reps, falling short of those expectations can leave them frustrated and chances are high that they might replace your brand with any of your competitors.
So, live chat, when used properly, is more than just a support tool—it’s an opportunity to build trust, boost satisfaction, and turn casual visitors into loyal customers. Here in this blog, we will explore 16 live chat best practices that can help your business offer seamless and satisfying customer services while improving operational efficiency.
Customer support technology, such as live chat, empowers agents to respond promptly and accurately. By adopting effective live chat practices, you can elevate the quality of communication with your customers and provide consistent support across all touchpoints. The following best practices are designed to help you create, train, and manage a skilled and professional live chat team that delivers outstanding customer care and support.
You have likely heard the phrase, “Walk a mile in your customer’s shoes.” This means putting yourself in their position to view the situation from their perspective. By thinking like a customer and understanding their needs, you can deliver solutions that are both relevant and effective.
Chat widget on the website
When the customers visit your website, they will follow their instinct to take action. To provide a better live chat experience, place the chat widget in strategic locations on your website. Proper placement is crucial to ensure it is easily visible and accessible to your customers.
According to Nielsen-Norman Group research, customers tend to scan in an F-shaped pattern. The standard placement for live chat customer support is on the bottom-right of a window screen as customers expect their live chat widget to be available there.
Customers want fast replies. With live chat of course you can provide that but it’s also important to set an expected response time. On average, the wait time for live chat is around two minutes, but there are cases where customers don’t want to wait even more than 40 seconds. In these cases, offering self-serve options may work well to ease the pressure on your live chat agents.
When it comes to customer service, it’s no secret that long wait times are something to be avoided at all costs. Customers expect faster responses without having to wait for long. Canned responses are a smart way to improve your customer response time and deliver a better experience.
Canned Responses
Canned responses are pre-written replies to common queries that can be sent to customers instantly. Here is how canned replies help in improving the response time.
82% of consumers look for an immediate response from brands on marketing or sales questions. Routing chat requests to the appropriate departments ensures faster resolution, as subject matter experts handle the queries directly.
Chat Routing
With intelligent routing, your live chat support team can:
Video chat offers faster solutions by identifying the actual problem and improving the customer experience. Face-to-face chat helps you to build a better relationship with clients by providing personalized assistance to customers.
Video chat
Here’s how video chat enhances live chat support:
The co-browsing solution helps to collaborate with customers without letting them wait, which improves the response time. The sharing of the browser screen during the live chat sessions helps through complex form fill-up and application process, makes conversations interactive, and delivers a virtual in-person experience.
How does co-browsing improve the conversational experience?
Some basic etiquettes need to be followed while you interact with your customers over live chat sessions. The way of interaction is different from how you talk to your friends, and it is very important to understand the differences. Poor customer service fails to impress customers and affects your business rapport too. If you follow the right chat etiquette it will undoubtedly create a perfect experience.
Here are some tips for you:
The best way to win the hearts of your customers is to close their cases in the first contact itself, without having them have to come back multiple times and go over the same questions again.
Chatbots have a big impact on the customer communication landscape. 64% of internet users say 24-hour service is the best chatbot feature. Powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), our advanced REVE Chatbot understands and provides human-like responses in multiple languages, enabling businesses to deliver instant and accurate support even for complex queries without requiring continuous human involvement.
It provides instant assistance to your customers round the clock and when all of your support agents are busy in other important tasks.
No matter, you are a startup or a growing business, your live chat software should be seamlessly integrated with your existing business tools. It is a must-have practice that every business follows to automate and align things in a better way.
Automating tasks by connecting live chat with your other business tools is a big-time saver and productivity booster. Having such integrations helps you to spend your time more on customers and less on administrative tasks. REVE Chat offers seamless integrations with most of the popular tools to help you manage your business in a better way.
At times, live support representatives face problems in communicating with customers in a cheerful manner. When you manage to deliver human-like conversations then only businesses can set memorable customer service examples. By adding a human touch, you can delight customers which can lead to an increase in the customer lifetime value (CLTV). It also significantly impacts your brand credibility.
Here are some important tips for you:
You need to engage with your customers at the right moment through proactive chats. This is where live chat triggers come in handy. Triggers are automated actions that initiate a chat based on specific user behavior or criteria but using them strategically is also important. You can’t ignore the customers who land on your website. You can reach out to them and engage by sending proactive triggers in real-time.
Here are some common situations where you can send chat triggers to start conversations:
By identifying the right live chat metrics and KPIs, you can measure your Service Level Standards (SLAs) and access live chat performance. With REVE Chat’s advanced reporting and analytics, you can measure your team performance against your defined KPI and improve the negative areas.
Here are a couple of key live chat metrics to measure the profit meeting the objectives:
Your customers always expect quick, convenient, and consistent support across all channels they use to communicate with your brand. An omnichannel live chat service ensures that customers can switch between channels—such as a website, mobile app, social media, or messaging apps—without losing context.
So, make sure your live chat tool seamlessly integrates with most of the common customer communication platforms. An omnichannel live chat platform connects website chat, social media messaging (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc), email, and phone support into a single, unified platform. This integration allows agents to view past interactions and use them as references, ensuring customers don’t have to repeat themselves when switching channels.
To offer omnichannel live chat service, you need to:
14. Categorize Chats with Tags
Tagging customer chats is very helpful. It can be used to categorize the chats based on queries e.g. product, price, or sales. When chats are categorized, they can be followed up further from the same place it has been left. Tagged queries enable support agents to follow up effortlessly without gathering the basic information again.
Why categorize chats with tags?
Pre-Chat Survey Form
Pre-chat survey forms are an effective way to gather basic customer information, such as names, email addresses, or customer IDs, before starting a live chat session. This approach streamlines the interaction by eliminating the need to ask these questions during the chat. With this information readily available, you can deliver faster, more efficient, and highly personalized service. The form can also help in organizing and directing issues to the concerned departments for faster resolution.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates
And the easy way to know if your customers are happy or unhappy with your products and services is by asking for customer feedback. Client feedback is vital for every business and an important factor that determines the growth of your business.
Feedback gives your business a clearer view of how it is performing. Collecting feedback requires asking customers to share their feedback about the product, service, or overall experience. You can use customer satisfaction surveys, feedback forms, and questionnaires to collect feedback.
Post-Chat Survey Form
How does obtaining feedback help businesses?
The best time to ask for feedback from customers is right after the customer service conversation. Collecting feedback becomes effective when you analyze and act upon it.
To offer best-in-class customer services, you need to implement live chat best practices. By maintaining high service quality, optimizing workflows, and personalizing interactions, you can build lasting customer relationships and enhance overall satisfaction. However, success in live chat support also depends on using the right tools.
REVE Chat is designed to empower your customer service team with advanced live chat features, automates customer service and other business operations, and enables seamless communication and faster resolutions, with a personalized touch. Ready to transform your customer support? SIGN UP for REVE Chat today and take the first step towards delivering exceptional live chat experiences!
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