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Effective communication is the key to building and nurturing long-lasting customer relationships. 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. 51% of customers prefer to live chat as it connects immediately with agents.
Having a live chat button on the website opens convenient communication ways for online sales and customer support, it is critical to delivering effective chats. Hence training your teams with the right customer service etiquette and live chat tips is crucial to bring the best of the conversations.
However, it has its own set of challenges. One challenge is to make chats effective. And to deliver top-notch service, roofing a well trained and knowledgeable team is imperative.
We have compiled the list of best live chat tips to help your team to deliver a great customer experience.
The reason why customers prefer using the best live chat is because of the higher satisfaction they get as compared to other communication channels. Regardless of advanced technology, a major portion of chat sessions still depends on human agents.
Here is a list of customer support chat tips to boost customer satisfaction and experience.
Let us discuss the live chat tips to keep in mind to ensure excellent conversational support.
Live chat is a popular communication channel as it helps to connect with your customers immediately. Econsultancy says, “ 79% of customers say they prefer live chat because of the instant response it offers as compared to other reactive channels.”
Faster response time is one of the key metrics to improve customer service, which is why response time matters. The lower is the response time, the higher is the customer satisfaction. Live chat empowers agents to handle multiple conversations, without making customers wait for a longer time.
Follow the below live chat best practices:
Using advanced co-browsing tools helps to collaborate with your customers in real time and guide them through complex form fillup or application process. It makes conversations interactive and delivers a virtual in person experience.
It helps you to 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.
How co-browsing proves to be an amazing customer support chat tips:
When customers face problems with your products and services, they expect a real time effective response. Video chat helps to interact with customers face to face and boost customer satisfaction.
Higher satisfaction rate is a key factor influencing customer retention and increasing their lifetime value.
How to enhance customer experience by using video?
Having a personalized engagement with customers is one of the best strategies to improve customer service.
Recording complex and lengthy customer service chats can be one of the great live chat tips as it helps to gain a better understanding of live chat conversations and how your team is performing.
You can understand your customers by hearing the recordings and get a chance to read between the lines of the conversation. Recording support calls helps businesses to gain valuable insights and improve the customer engagement strategy.
You can enable the voice and video recording options and choose it as the default option for specific conversations on request.
Chat tips for recording conversations:
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 to deliver prompt replies to customers and handle conversations efficiently. When agents know what to say when the chats are managed effectively. With the right live chat scripts and phrases, you not only resolve your customer’s queries but also deliver a consistent customer experience.
Live chat best practices for using chat transcripts:
Advanced routing features help to manage your chats by automatically transferring them to the right live chat agent or team. It helps to reduce the queue time significantly by providing a prompt response to the customers.
How does routing help to enhance live chat experience?
Routing is based on three rules – time based routing, broadcasting, and URL based routing.
Routing encourages cross departmental communication by sending chats to the right departments or team. The concerned team holds the product or service expertise to handle the chat reducing the queue time.
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.
Key live chat metrics are as follows:
Live chat support is one of the most used channels for collecting customer feedback. The ideal time to ask customer feedback through rating customer service. Asking customers to provide their feedback immediately after a demo or live chat session is the best practice to be followed.
Tips on asking feedback questions to your customers:
Measuring customer satisfaction comes down to collecting customer feedback via different methods (surveys, polls). Once you collect feedback, you can categorize and distribute them to the department to act on it.
Many visitors and customers make a tour on your website daily. Usually, the prospects keep dropping off after spending some time on a specific page of your website. In order to convert such visitors, you can start a chat with proactive chat messages.
Live chat best practices for using proactive chat triggers rightly are:
Note: Automated triggers help website visitors and customers in making 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. These responses are one of the best live chat tips that can be followed to offer extraordinary customer service.
How canned responses improve live chat conversations?
You type reply once, save it and then reuse it during live chat sessions with a few keystrokes.
Here is a live chat training tip for using canned responses.
It is important to use canned responses smartly and wisely. The live chat representatives should be well trained not to overuse canned replies during a live chat conversation. It may make your customers feel that they are talking to a robot.
Personalization is an evergreen trend that will never stop to show its magic.
The concept of personalization is adopted by all businesses as the prime focus of every business is customer acquisition. Live chat helps to personalize your chat conversations, greetings and visitors information that builds 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.
Follow the live chat best practices to customize your chat widget:
It is not always what you say but how you say it – which is important. So, using a positive tone can be one of the best live chat tips to be followed by your support agents.
For handling any difficult situation, using tone in your words can help you to tackle the customer as well as the scenario in a better way.
For example, if you have one of your items out of stock. And for the customer’s inquiry, you can reply in two ways. You can decide which has a positive tone between the two and sounds better.
Adding tags helps your support agents to organize the live chat messages in a better way and sort them according to priority.
With tags, agents are able to perform the below things:
Integrating your live chat with other business tools such as e-commerce is a good chat customer service tip. When there is a new chat request, you can seamlessly transfer to CRM software and manage conversations effectively.
Benefits of live chat CRM integration:
Talk softly, and carry a big stick. – Theodore Roosevelt
Understanding customers’ mood and psychology are vital to deliver the service they are looking for. Customers may not be happy with your product or service. They can blast their anger at you.
Training your support team with the proper chat etiquette can help them in handling customer conversations much better.
Here are the live chat training tips that can be followed for handling conversations.
At times, agents initiate chat with customers and over awhile they realize that it is not their cup of tea. So what next?
You really can’t afford them leaving in a frustrated mind.
In order to handle such scenarios, you must have a well defined internal system to escalate the issues to the right team or agent, who can provide effective solutions. When the chat transfer happens, ensure that the customer is aware of it.
Transferring of chats to the right agent at the right time saves time as well as builds brand rapport.
Follow the live chat best practices: Train your chat agents to transfer chat sessions when required. Also, each agent must have a list of other agents and their levels of expertise.
We all have probably seen the board “OPEN” or “CLOSE” in front of the restaurant entry point. As it gives whether the restaurant is open to serve or not, likewise setting online and offline messages are vital to providing customers with a clear idea about your agent’s availability.
Setting a personalized online or offline message for live chat availability helps you to 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 while 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.
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, slangs, jokes, or sarcasm. Avoiding such elements during conversation helps to maintain a good professional image to the customers.
During live chat conversations, agents are not who are presenting themselves, but it’s your band. If the agents do not have good chat handlings skills, it is not going to affect them but will directly impact your brand reputation.
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, new customer, or returning customers.
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:
Customers appreciate the fact that they don’t have to repeat their previous problems to newly assigned chat agents.
Multilingual chat support is an important live chat tip, as a matter of fact, 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.
With multilingual chat support, you can enhance customer service which further leads to increased customer loyalty and rapid business growth. A loyal customer base is sure to provide a medium of the word of mouth marketing.
Empower your team heads and managers to monitor live chat conversations in real time. It helps to understand how your chat operations are handling the conversations. Are they able to meet the key service metrics or not.
Gauging the conversations provides you the opportunity to understand the areas for internal training and employee support.
One of the most common frustrations of customers that makes them leave your website is 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 usually like to know about their customers. They want to learn about whom they are talking to. Using pre chat forms can be great live chat tips if you want to collect customers’ details prior to interacting with them.
You can configure pre-chat forms for both the scenarios – when agents 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 the same information every time.
With the information, you can automatically route customers to the right agents or departments for faster support.
Placing the live chat button is a great chat tip as it starts a conversation. 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 upper-right corner of each page. Train your website designer to provide the chat button in a strategically spot across the pages of your website.
Note: Do not place chat buttons at the bottom of the page, as they will disappear below the fold and may not grab attention.
Chatbot automation improves live chat customer satisfaction by handling basic queries round the clock. It works hand in hand with agents by collecting customer details before transferring the conversation to the right agent.
AI chatbots can live chat customer experience in the following ways:
KLM launched a chatbot via Facebook Messenger called “BB” ( BlueBot). The BlueBot helped passengers to book tickets and updated them on flight status, gate changes, and similar data-driven functions.
The customer service bot handled more than 16,000 customer interactions weekly and in just 6 months, BB sent nearly two million messages to more than 500,000 customers.
Follow the live chat best practices:
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. For example,
“OK, I’ll explain”
“To upgrade you first have to go to your dashboard.”
This is a simple way you can engage your customers in a meaningful conversation rather than overloading them with too much information. Breaking up your thoughts in small bites helps you to redirect the conversation quickly when the customer can intervene when they find that you are talking about apples, while they meant pears.
One of the key live chat tips 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.
Close the conversation with a positive note by thanking customers visitors for their time and making them feel appreciated. Happy customers are loyal customers.
Live chat is indeed the most preferred customer communication platform due to its ability to provide instant support with human touch during the conversation. The “human” part in the process is expressed through the live chat representatives or agents, who should be well trained and knowledgeable to engage with customers on a personal level.
Hopefully, the 30 customer support chat tips discussed above will help you to manage customer conversations efficiently and deliver an excellent live chat experience.
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