What Is Live Chat And How It Can Help You Boost Your Customer Experience

Customers expect businesses to provide real-time support online. Understandably, this requires much more financial resources, which you may not be able to afford. There are plenty of solutions to this problem, though. 

For instance, you could outsource your customer support to an off-shore provider, but there is a much simpler solution that provides relatively the same benefits - we’re talking about live chat. 

However, while live chat support is easy to implement on your website, to unlock its full potential, you need to align all tools with your customer support reps. 

Continue reading this article to learn more about this customer support channel and the benefits of live chat you can experience upon effective implementation. 

What is Live Chat?

Live chat is a simple tool that allows customers to easily connect with human support representatives online. This makes it easy for users to get solutions to their issues quickly without making a phone call or searching for a solution in your knowledge base (if you have one, of course).

Many companies today combine live chat with a chatbot, another real-time communication tool. That way, customers can communicate with a human-like AI bot during the early stages of the chat and be moved to a human rep if the issue requires escalation. 

Live chat software is relatively simple and can be embedded into the code of your website, appearing as a widget. When customers click the button on the widget, they’ll see the chat window appear. 

What Are the Benefits of Live Chat?

For such a simple tool, live chat offers a variety of benefits, some of which are:

1. Reduced handling time

Long waiting times are the bane of all customer service interactions. Fortunately, if you add live chat to your website, you can significantly cut down on your average handling time. 

Customers won’t have to wait minutes upon minutes to receive an answer to a simple query, and the live chat functionality allows them to ask easy follow-up questions. Ultimately, your agents won’t have to make additional calls to clarify the issue, and all the parties involved will save time. 

  2. Providing omnichannel support

Many business owners and managers ask the question why is live chat important to an online business. The straightforward answer is that it enables them to start providing omnichannel support to customers. Everyone wants more convenience these days and live chat delivers in this regard, allowing customers more choice in how they interact with your business.

In addition, since live chat gives customers the opportunity to directly contact your sales or support team, they won’t need to leave your site. Thus, you can improve the overall customer experience while also reducing your website’s bounce rates.

 3. Integration with customer service software

Live chat is easy to integrate with other forms of customer service software, allowing you to automate plenty of laborious tasks. 

For instance, by integrating chatbots with a live chat tool, you can provide automatic answers to recurring questions and problems, freeing up your service reps to attend to more serious issues. 

Best Practices for Implementing a Live Chat

To get the most out of your live chat, you should take note of the following practices:

1. Shoot for the highest speed

Customers will expect you to answer their questions immediately. Even though live chat will simplify the connection between the reps and customers, your customer service agents can only answer questions so fast. 

As such, you should ensure all your other tools are up-to-date and optimized for speed.

 2. Implement a clean offline strategy

Most businesses don’t have support teams in various time zones, meaning it’s impossible to provide live chat services during off hours. The solution to this problem is shutting down the feature when your agents are unavailable. 

You can also use a canned response to inform your customers they’ll reach the agent once you’re back online.

However, customers sometimes expect to have their issues resolved instantly, this is why you should implement a chatbot to get you through the off hours in addition to a FAQ section or a knowledge base. A chatbot may be able to resolve small issues while also passing on information to your response team. 

 3. Respond swiftly

Your customer service team should be able to provide quick answers to customers. This is why you should train your employees to improve their typing speed, leveraging saved responses, or using text expanders. 

A quick response is something your customers will appreciate.

Along with speed, the answer should also be concise and your agents should possess deep knowledge about your offerings to explain complicated concepts in simple terms. This may require minimizing fluff and being direct.

 4. Work on closing the chat

Agents representing your company should always close out the experience on a positive note. Each conversation has to have a clear end point with the agent finishing off with something positive. 

An agent should confirm that the question has been answered, and provide detailed instructions. 

It may be beneficial to explain to the customer how they can reach you if any new issues arise, followed by thanking them for their time. 

Boost Your Customer Service Experience

Customers (especially younger ones) often prefer to reach out to businesses using live chat technology. This is completely understandable as calling customer service is never fun. Furthermore, most customers don’t see live chat for websites as a neat new feature, they actually expect to see them on professional sites. 

If you want to provide an acceptable level of service, implementing a live chat service is a must. 

Apart from being an improvement for your customers, using a live chat not only improves the productivity of your agents but allows you to source essential business data, both of which can improve your overall success. 

Don’t know how to start?

Here at Oamii, our expert designers provide quality, responsive websites with live chat support, chatbots, and all other modern bells and whistles. Our goal is to provide reliable services to businesses of all sizes at an affordable price. 

Our track record is impeccable and you can rest assured that you’ll have qualified experts working on your website and making it prime for success.

Let us know how we can assist you - fill out our contact form to schedule a call.