;)
Customer Experience (CX) is rapidly evolving due to higher competitiveness among businesses. Companies need all the competitive advantages they can get in order to be successful. However, finding a competitive advantage through their products and services alone has become impossible.
41% of consumers prefer live chat to connect with the support teams and have the highest consumer satisfaction rate at 92%.
Leveraging digital communication channels like live chat allows businesses to connect instantly with customers and address their queries. By implementing a live chat strategy, you can improve customer service communication that enhances the experience and develops strong relationships with customers.
Customer service can be challenging at times. Usually, the customers face a lot of challenges in their buying journey. One of the first common problems customers encounter is the long resolution time for their queries. Many customers lose their temper because they are being switched between departments. Sometimes a customer might receive a faulty product and the complaint is not accepted.
Live chat tool is the preference of customers as it helps to communicate with the support agent in real time via the chat window. Customer service representatives can provide support to users who have questions regarding products or website navigation.
Unlike reactive support like email or phone, the proactive live chat support enables you to see the activity of the user on the website. You can reach out to them and send proactive chat triggers based on their journey and deliver an effortless customer experience.
Implementing live chat as part of the overall customer communication strategy can help businesses across key business functions.
Lead generation is vital for all businesses, particularly for small businesses. According to the Forrester report, “Live chat use among customers has escalated substantially in the past few years.” These growing numbers indicate that more and more customers are visiting company websites via live chat.
As per the Econsultancy report, “Customers applaud the advantage of being able to use live chat without committing a huge chunk of time and priority to the task.” The quality product & customer support determines the success of your business. One of the best ways to deliver an excellent customer experience is to provide real time assistance by automating help 24×7 with live chat for customer support.
If you wondering how to add live chat to your website, it is a very simple process that includes few steps that don’t require technical expertise. Live chat starts functioning as soon as you paste the short snippet code into the web pages.
Here the steps to be followed:
Once you paste the code, check that the integration is successful or not. Once it is successfully added to the website or mobile apps, your visitors can see the live chat widget on the lower corner of your website and initiate conversations.
There are a couple of key areas that need to be properly planned for successfully implementing the live chat strategy. Defining the core objectives and defining the plan effectively will help to implement live chat service successfully.
Here is a list of important steps to be considered while outlining a live chat strategy for your business.
Go through the points discussed below to get an idea about the important steps to be considered.
Identifying your core business requirements is vital for implementing a live chat strategy. Evaluating the objectives and the use cases of live chat software helps in making the deployment successful. Your support team should able to answer some of the following questions before you even start searching for the right solution.
Having a thorough understanding of the above will help to understand your customer’s preferences and the right features you need in your live chat platform. An article by New York Times says – customers hesitate to ask for assistance first. With live chat for small businesses, you will be able to get the upper hand and deliver proactive assistance whenever needed.
Outlining the key performance indicators (KPIs) is important as it helps businesses to understand if they are able to meet customer expectations and measure customer satisfaction scores. The metrics also help to measure agent performance in terms of how they are handling customer conversations. Also, the live chat KPIs help businesses to calculate the cost and RoI associated with the online chat support.
Here are the key metrics & KPIs you must track to review your live chat implementation in order to measure how profitable they have been in gaining the objectives.
Customers expect faster responses to their queries and delay in response can risk your business to the competitors.
Hence, adding the best live chat tool helps to communicate with your customers. Live chat app not only adds another dimension to customer experience but also increases your sales by making your visitors into buyers. However, choosing the right live chat platform actually depends on your business requirements.
Here are some key criteria to look for while considering the live chat strategy.
Customers choose multiple platforms to communicate with you. They can contact you from web chat, social media, phone, email etc. and these touch points should be interconnected with your live chat platform for a seamless customer experience. Omnichannel service reduces your customer’s pain points and omits inconsistencies in your customer support.
“Companies with good omnichannel customer engagement can retain 89% of customers, as compared to 33% companies that do not follow omnichannel customer engagement.
Advanced technology and new marketing strategies have offered a number of ways to connect with the customers and deliver a better customer service experience.
What if your website visitor is browsing the service or the pricing page?
Delivering real-time engagement through video chat or live chat guides the customer in the right way with his queries and help him to walk through the services and provide accurate information. Following real-time engagement benefits your company in several ways.
Implement a live chat strategy that easily integrates with your CRM and other business services you use. Smooth integration is convenient and gets instant access to the required information right in a live chat. Live chat like Reve Chat, provides API that allows smooth integration with a large number of services.
There are a few other questions that need to be looked into while choosing the right live chat platform like – Do they have mobile apps? Does the live chat platform have access to API? And Should you go for an on-premise or cloud-based platform?
A well-planned live chat strategy enhances the customer experience and increases conversion rates. But your efforts might go to waste if you don’t have a well-trained support team. Your customer depends upon your sales and support agents to possess product or service knowledge and have the ability to deliver the information in a quick yet pleasant manner.
What should companies focus on when training the support team?
Follow some tips that will help to take the benefit of the live chat to the brim.
For planning a live chat strategy there are multiple things that need to be defined in order to deliver excellent customer service. You can define –
Properly defining the above areas will help to deliver a customer experience.
Businesses both small or big can reap the advantage of chatbot implementation. With chatbots and automation, the live chat tools give you the ability to have live, dynamic, conversations even when the agent is not there at the end of the messenger. It helps in simple transactions, lead generation, sales, filtering of spam, and more.
According to Gartner, “Customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.”
Key benefits of chatbots along with the live chat tool
Customer experience is an imperative part of customer relationship management (CRM). A customer with a satisfied and positive customer experience with your business might become your loyal or repeat customer. Delivering better quality of service and reducing the response time helps in gaining better customer satisfaction.
There are different ways to check out what your customers are looking for or share their experience after using the product or service. You can implement chat surveys to collect feedback. This will help you to know the loopholes to fill and improve the areas that the customer is looking for. Planning to set an effective live chat strategy helps in complete customer satisfaction.
Many companies have well-defined incentive programs for the sales and support team. A target is set by the company and the sales/support agent has to meet or cross the target to showcase his exceptional competencies. Rewards in form of money or title are given to the best performer.
Here are a few examples:
Live chat strategy implementation helps in reporting with the calls initiated by agents for customer service. You have to evaluate the customer conversations and communication on a regular basis to:
Planning a live chat strategy helps to achieve business objectives but you should also consider other key factors such as omnichannel, team management, and internal training to get optimum results. With AI bots, live chat can become the most powerful channel to deliver sales and support assistance and also automating your routine tasks. So it’s the best of both worlds, better performance, and lower costs.
Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required
Stay updated with the latest trends and ideas we share
Companies face many struggles in customer service such as language barriers, lack of personalized support, unable to solve issues swiftly,...
Generative AI has revolutionized the world with the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs). It is such a technology that...
Nowadays, customers expect instant responses and seamless resolutions, and businesses require a reliable way to manage inquiries without missing a...
