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Let’s look into this scenario: A customer is facing some issues with one of your products and needs instant assistance. He/she visits your website, hoping to find quick answers to the queries. The customer is going through the web pages, struggling with unhelpful FAQs, and finally gives up. No one is there to help him/her out. This is a very common scenario that often leads to lost sales and bad customer experience.
Customers expect quick assistance and the traditional support channels like emails or phone calls often fall short in meeting these expectations. But live chat tools are the savior here. Live chat is a critical part of a successful customer service toolkit, providing a platform to communicate with customers in real-time and boosting satisfaction levels.
Here are some stats to look into:
But for the best results, you need to use live chat effectively. This blog will guide you through essential live chat tips to maximize its potential. From building rapport with customers to resolving issues efficiently, you’ll discover all the actionable insights.
What is Live Chat
Live chat is a real-time communication channel that allows customers to interact directly with a brand through instant messaging on a website or mobile app.
Unlike other traditional customer service methods, such as phone calls or emails, live chat provides immediate assistance and enables businesses to address customer queries instantly.
In a very short time, live chat has gained immense popularity among businesses due to its speed, convenience, and ability to offer personalized communication. Whether a customer needs assistance with a product or service, has queries, or is seeking technical support, live chat offers a fast and efficient way to resolve issues.
You have chosen a great live chat tool and successfully integrated it into your website—well done! But that’s only the beginning. To achieve the best results, you need to master the art of using it effectively. Despite the advancements in technology, a significant part of live chat success still relies on how human agents manage customer interactions.
To help you get the most out of your live chat tool, here are some customer support tips that can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and overall experience.
Live chat is a popular communication channel that helps you immediately connect with your customers. Econsultancy says, “79% of customers say they prefer live chat because of the instant response it offers compared to other reactive channels.”
Faster response time is one of the key metrics for improving customer service, which is why it matters. The lower the response time, the higher the customer satisfaction. Live chat empowers agents to handle multiple conversations without making customers wait for a longer time.
REVE Chat is one such advanced AI-powered live chat platform that offers real-time assistance on websites, mobile apps, and other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp. To know more about its advanced features SIGN UP for its 14-day free trial today.
Live chat includes an advanced co-browsing feature that enables agents to navigate a customer’s screen, making it easier to resolve complex issues efficiently. It helps agents take control of the customer screen and deliver first contact resolution (FCR). The co-browsing solution comprises advanced WebRTC technology that allows a seamless peer-to-peer communication and effective engagement.
With advanced co-browsing tools, you can collaborate with customers in real time, guiding them through complex processes like form fill-ups or application submissions effortlessly. It makes conversations interactive and delivers a virtual in-person experience.
When customers face problems with your products or services, they expect quick and efficient real-time support. Video chat enables face-to-face interactions, and lets customers describe their issues in a better way. After all having a personalized engagement with customers is one of the best strategies to improve customer service.
How to enhance customer experience by using video chat?
Recording complex and lengthy customer service chats is one of the best live chat features as it helps brands to understand the quality of support service, and how the live chat agents are performing.
You can also understand your customers’ requirements and take references for future conversations by hearing the recordings. Recording support calls helps businesses to gain valuable insights and improve their customer engagement strategy. You can enable the voice and video recording options and choose it as the default option for specific conversations on request.
Software Advice Research says “84% of surveyed customers felt their experience improves “more than slightly” when an agent was able to answer confidently.”
Using well-designed live chat scripts helps agents deliver prompt replies to customers and handle conversations efficiently. With the right live chat scripts and phrases, you not only resolve your customer’s queries but also deliver a consistent customer experience.
The advanced chat routing feature helps to manage your chats efficiently by automatically transferring them to the right live chat agent or team. Customers will receive quick support from the right experts, ensuring problems are resolved efficiently.
Chat Routing
The chat metrics help you monitor the effectiveness of your live chat performance and identify the areas you need to improve. With the continuous measurement of key performance indicators (KPIs), you can improve the live chat experience of your customers as well as team productivity.
Live chat tools offer vast reporting and analytics to monitor the quality of customer service and agent performance.
Live chat support is one of the most used channels for collecting customer feedback. The ideal way to ask for customer feedback is through rating that specific live chat interaction. Asking customers to provide their feedback immediately after a demo or live chat session is the best practice to be followed.
Customer Feedback Form
Visitors land on your website daily. Usually, the prospects keep dropping off after spending some time on a specific page of your website. To convert such visitors, you can start a chat with proactive chat messages. These automated triggers help you offer assistance to your website visitors, much before they even ask for it.
Automated triggers help website visitors and customers make quick decisions and result in more live chat sales conversions. For example, you can send proactive trigger messages to those prospects who spend more than 50 seconds on your pricing or product page. Connect with them to understand if they have any concerns and answer their questions to negotiate a discount.
Canned responses are the preset responses for FAQs that are used by agents to deliver faster replies to customers during the ongoing conversation. It saves a lot of your agent’s time and decreases the chances of typo errors.
It’s very easy to use. You type reply once, save it and then reuse it during live chat sessions with a few keystrokes. These can maximize the efficiency of your customer support team, by balancing the response time efficiently.
Canned Responses
Personalization is an evergreen trend that will never stop to show its magic. Live chat helps to personalize your chat conversations and greetings that build trust in customers.
You can personalize live chat sessions in the following ways:
Live chat offers different widget customization options to match your website branding. Make sure to customize your chat widget to reflect your brand and boost your overall customer experience.
It is not always what you say but how you say it that is important. So, using a positive tone can be one of the best live chat tips for your support agents to follow. For handling any difficult situation, being positive and reflecting on that in your interactions can help you better tackle the customer and the scenario.
For instance, imagine one of your items is out of stock, and a customer inquires about it. You have two possible ways to respond. Which one do you think conveys a more positive tone and sounds better? Obviously the first one!
“We no longer have the product.”
“We are out of stock now, but I would be happy to introduce you to a similar new product that might satisfy your needs.”
When support agents handle a huge volume of chats, keeping track of specific interactions and organizing them effectively becomes challenging. This is where chat tags come into play. Tags are simple labels or keywords that can be assigned to live chat conversations to improve trackingChoose tag names that are clear and easily understood by analysis. Adding tags helps your support agents organize the live chat messages in a better way and sort them according to priority.
Integrating your live chat with other business tools is a must. When there is a new chat request, you can seamlessly transfer to CRM software and manage conversations effectively.
Talk softly and carry a big stick. – Theodore Roosevelt
Understanding customers’ moods and psychology is vital to delivering the services they are looking for. Customers may not be happy with your product or service. They can blast their anger at you. But you need to handle such situations calmly. Training your support team with the proper chat etiquette can help them handle customer conversations much better.
Here are the live chat training tips that can be followed for handling conversations:
We all have probably seen the board “OPEN” or “CLOSE” in front of the restaurant entry point. As it gives an idea of whether the restaurant is open to serve or not, likewise setting online and offline messages is also important to provide customers with a clear idea about your agent’s availability.
Setting a personalized online or offline message for live chat availability helps you manage your customer expectations. It offers clarity to your customers on when they can connect with you to report their queries.
Language is the main part of communicating with customers. The right use of words always leaves a good impression. As a part of live chat tips, you need to take care of a few things during the conversation such as:
Consistency plays a key role in delivering a great live chat experience. You should maintain a consistent brand voice that matches your chat conversations as well to your website, social channels, emails, and all your branded materials.
When you keep your brand messaging consistent at every touchpoint, it has a significant impact on your business credibility. Here are the benefits you can witness:
One of the most important live chat handling skills is to avoid offending language, slang, jokes, or sarcasm. Avoiding such elements during conversation helps to maintain a good professional image to the customers.
During live chat conversations, agents are presenting your band. If the agents do not have good chat handling skills, it is not going to affect them but will directly impact your brand reputation.
Through chat history, you can have an understanding of how your agents are performing. Also, live chat agents may gain valuable insights by quickly reviewing previous chats with an individual customer. Chat history helps you to learn whether the customer is a first-time visitor, a new customer, or a returning customer.
Usually, returning customers don’t want to reintroduce themselves time and again. Checking the chat history could be one of the good live chat tips because:
Through multilingual chat support, customers can easily get all their queries resolved in their native languages. It makes them feel more engaged and increases the probability of them being repeat customers. You can also enhance customer service which further leads to increased customer loyalty and rapid business growth.
Empower your team heads and managers to monitor live chat conversations in real time. It helps to understand how your support agents are handling chat requests and find out the improvement areas. Decide what aspects to focus on—response time, agent performance, quality of customer service, customer satisfaction etc to get the best out of live chat tools. REVE Chat offers advanced analytics and reports based on several aspects such as agent login and logout times, chat history, agent performance, etc to understand the quality of your overall customer service.
One of the most common frustrations of customers that makes them leave your website is the long response time. With live chat queuing, you can manage your customer expectations effectively by proactively giving the estimated waiting time when your agents are busy. When you provide a specific queue time to your customers, they calmly wait for their turn without getting annoyed.
Businesses need to collect customer details and live chat is one of the best ways to do so. By collecting essential information before a conversation begins, agents can provide faster and more personalized support. You can configure pre-chat forms for both scenarios – when agents are online and offline.
The forms can give enough details about your customers and help agents to deliver a better response. These details can be saved for future use as well instead of asking for the same information every time. With the information, you can automatically route customers to the right agents or departments for faster support.
Pre-Chat Survey Form
Placing the live chat button at the correct location is very important. Your customers should know where to go when they are stuck in any page and need assistance. All of your products, services, and solutions pages should feature a live chat button in a consistent location. The buttons are ideally placed in the lower-right corner of each page. Train your website designer to provide the chat button strategically across the pages of your website.
By using bots businesses can automate routine tasks and customer service efficiently. REVE Chatbot is one such AI-powered multilingual chatbot that offers real-time assistance and automates most of your business operations. You can integrate REVE Chatbot on your website, mobile app and other social media platforms to offer real-time assistance 24/7. Want to give it a try? SIGN UP for the demo today.
Le Reve, an eCommerce platform specializing in fashion and lifestyle, offers seamless online shopping experiences to its customers. By integrating the REVE Chatbot, Le REVE has streamlined its operations and is offering best-in-class customer support. With REVE Chatbot, customers receive instant assistance on various aspects of their shopping journey, including billing, placing orders, returns, and more—all directly on the website. With REVE Chatbot, Le Reve offers real-time, 24/7 assistance, ensuring a smoother and more satisfying customer experience.
Live chat conversations are effective because they are quick and easy to consume. Instead of writing a lengthy paragraph during the ongoing conversation that may include all solution steps, it is better to break it into simple sentences. This is an effective way to engage your customers in a meaningful conversation without overwhelming them with excessive information at a time. By breaking your message into smaller chunks you can easily share your thoughts in a simple way.
The main objective of customer service is to deliver a good customer experience, whether it is sales, support, or marketing. You should make sure that you deliver a kind of support that satisfies and delights your customers. How you can do it? Here are some tips for you!
In live chat customer service, it’s important to understand your limits—what you can and cannot do. Whether you’re a human agent or offering service through a bot, setting clear boundaries is essential for delivering a positive customer experience. Recognizing these limits helps manage customer expectations, and prevent frustration. It ensures that you don’t overpromise, underdeliver, or attempt to address issues beyond your capabilities.
Live chat has become the go-to platform for customer communication, thanks to its ability to offer quick, real-time support with a personal touch. This personal connection is made possible by skilled live chat agents, who are well-trained and knowledgeable enough to engage effectively with customers and offer excellent services.
The 30 customer support chat tips shared in this blog are designed to help you use live chat tools in the best possible ways, manage customer interactions more efficiently and create a top-notch live chat experience. With the right strategies in place, you can ensure that every conversation leaves a positive impression.
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