Live chat : Best Practices

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Customers today are increasingly exposed to all forms of modern technologies. They interact with businesses that are readily accessible, have a wide range of options and provide appropriate information in real time. 

Following the need, the demand for live assistance, brand relationship and customer engagement has escalated simultaneously. Integrating a live chat support to your business can be a lot more beneficial providing the real time assistance to your customers allowing your brand to grow exponentially. Observing the best practices of Live chat is crucially essential to draw the best out of it.

  • Align live chat to your business goals- 

While incorporating live chat into your business, you must have a clear picture about why you want it, what you are seeking from its integration.

Live Chat must be aligned to the business goals infusing omnichannel support solutions in regard to achieving the goals of your business. Some of it might include – 

  • Meeting the Service Level Standards (SLAs)
  • Meeting customer support KPIs  of faster service, faster response time, customer demand
  • Solving customer queries

Its role in meeting the goals should be well determined to move along the path with a thoughtfully implanted live chat software.

  • Optimise the customer experience – 

Providing an unobtrusive experience to the users so that they can proactively visit your website and can easily reach out for any assistance throughout their experience. 

Live chat must be inculcated at the right location and be easily accessible to tackle the issues of the customers from visiting the site to dynamically making the purchases or abandoning their shopping cart. The goal is to create an environment that builds a loyalty relationship with your users dispensing a hindrance free and convenient trial.

  • Integrate live chat with your CRM and automation tools –

 Automating live chat with your CRM and other business tools can be a better way to save time and boost your productivity. Rather than managing the administrative tasks manually you can invest most of your time understanding your customers behaviour. 

Integrating the CRM with your live chat is an extremely beneficial feature for your business to sync the individual customer identities- name, email id, and any other personal preferences which can later be deployed for significant customer information adding up to your custom field data for developing a comprehensive relationship with your brand.

  • Make live chats available where users may have queries –

Ensure that the right place is crucial for easy visibility to your customers. Taking into account the usability factor, Live chat should at least be placed on the web pages where visitors are likely to interact the most – 

  • Services page
  • Contact page 
  • Landing page
  • Sales pages

           The aim of live chat is improving the             response time, meeting the customers queries in real time and supporting the chats with human connection to get the best results to build your brand relationship. 

  • Improve time response with Canned responses –

None of us wants to wait for replies, especially customers who tend to be most fluctuating. Canned responses is a smarter way to improve your response time and deliver a better experience. Customers expect a faster and effective response which are also not time consuming. Canned responses are beneficial in many ways:

  • Faster response – These are some predefined customized responses that boost the customers experience with quick replies.
  • Consistent brand voice – Predefined responses will present a consistent brand experience to the customers or the visitors during their website exploration. They maintain the right tone of language to provide a satisfactory exposure.
  • Customization is the key –  These preset responses can be altered to fit with the needs of each user making the responses personalized to each customer.
  • Categorize chats with tags – 

Tags are  one of the deadapted features of live chats but if used can be an appropriate path to route the chats accuracy based on the categorised tags assigned to each chat. The categorisation is based on the types of questions the customers can have. The chats are categorised with tags which are the forwarded to the right agent/department dealing with the particular query.

  • Use other channels to support live chat – 

Solving your customer’s challenges is the ultimate goal of all the customer service tactics. But most of all your marketing and business works better when you align your live chat with multiple channels. It becomes even more effective when communicating with your customers. 

You can at times provide your customers with internal links to different channels to provide them with in-depth information to resolve their queries. It gets easier maintaining a timely follow up of all the emails, chats and calls from a particular platform.

  • Co-browsing while live chatting –  

Co-browsing when integrated with live chat creates a direct communication channel where the agent can view the customers browser window to guide them throughout the process highlighting the different elements while continuing chatting. 

The entire communication is absolutely safe, secured with PCI DSS encryption standards with no hindrance to your privacy as the agent can only follow through the customers browser window. It is an eminent feature to provide remote assistance to your website visitors reducing response time in real time support.

  • Monitor the metrics and SLAs – 

Live chat metrics allow monitoring analytics on a regular basis ensuring your customers service standards. Adopting live chat metrics you can measure your team performance based on the specified KPIs (Key performance indicators) and determine areas for enhancement. 

Analysing data regarding live chat performance, customer satisfaction, average wait time, agent productivity and cost per conversation that can help your business define its Service Level Standard and deploy it to your business goals and team members creating a proper workflow.

Evoking the live chat best practices, businesses can primarily benefit in 3 key areas in approaching their customers expectations and leading for new ways to excel their customer service.

  • Live chat is instantaneous Live chat allows you to connect with the customers in real time. Understanding the customer queries in the first hand improving customer satisfaction levels in less than the average time required to settle them.
  • Live chat is aggregative Live chat improves your business efficiency by handling multiple tasks at a time from resolving several client’s challenges to custom data collection. It empowers your agents to control the specific tasks assigned through categorised tags enhancing your business productivity 
  • Improved Business ROI – With the use of live chat businesses can deliver better service at a faster pace driving more sales from your website, keeping your visitors engaged and satisfied with the utilities provided by your business can increase the business returns on investment.
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