Customer Support Chat Best Practices You Need to Follow
If you're reading this, you've probably already introduced customer support chat on your site or are considering it. If you fall into the latter category, let us assist you in making your decision — Live chat is preferred by 75% of people over any other channel, and it leads to a 40% boost in conversion rate.
When used effectively, live chat can be a very effective channel in any industry. Because of technological advancements and shifts in client preferences, live chat best practices are constantly evolving.
Let’s get started!
1. Install live chat on your entire website.
Live chat is a powerful communication tool, but only if your consumers are aware of it. Visitors will be more inclined to communicate with you if you make your live chat available on every page of your website. They may ask for assistance at any time and from any location without having to leave their current page - whether it's on the checkout page when they're ready to abandon, or on a product page with a question about delivery charges.
Setting up customer support chat on your website also allows you to monitor visitors across your site, allowing you to know which pages they've visited previously and which pages they're on right now. You may provide more personalized service to consumers and treat them as individuals with this information.
Top tip: Making live chat available across the site may not be the best option for some businesses. It may be more beneficial to add live chat to a specific page, such as 'Contact Us.' Some businesses may want to make live chat gated, allowing only users with specific credentials or account types to utilize it. Consider what you want your live chat to accomplish and the experience you want to provide your visitors before making a decision.
2. Maintain a short average response time.
The quickness of customer support chat is one of the reasons it is so popular. Customers need quick responses, and live chat is the best way to deliver them. However, this necessitates maintaining your chat concurrency (the number of simultaneous chats an agent can handle) and average response time low. A long response time might lead to increased desertion and unhappiness among customers.
Here are some critical things you can take to maintain quick response times:
- Use premade messages:
Using canned messages, customer support employees may greet consumers quickly and avoid typing the same replies over and over again.
- Create a pre-chat survey:
Create a quick pre-chat survey before connecting with an agent to better understand your customer's issue and expedite the interaction. These surveys can also assist in focusing on the consumer and providing time for them to clarify their question.
- Use agent-facing AI:
While your agent is conversing with a customer, Agent Assist, an AI-powered tool, watches the discussion, understands the questions asked, and provides replies to your agent in real-time so they don't have to look up or type the answer.
- Send rich media:
Instead of writing lengthy, complex responses, you can save time by providing photographs, files, screenshots, or even how-to videos. This can aid in the clarification of a problem, allowing it to be resolved more quickly. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say... Save yourself the time and effort of composing lengthy responses!
3. Establish explicit timelines.
As previously said, the goal is to respond to clients as soon as possible, although this isn't always achievable for most live chat operators. In some circumstances, the next best customer support chat strategy is to set clear and acceptable expectations. The steps:
- Be honest about how long you'll be waiting.
If a consumer must wait, inform them of how long they will have to wait and what they will be waiting for. If you need to look into their problem or refer them to a professional, inform them ahead of time so they know they're in excellent hands and you haven't forgotten about them.
- Specify your operating hours.
Say so if your company offers live chat service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If not, your website should include information about operating hours. To avoid misleading clients, turn off live chat while your firm is closed or your representatives are unavailable. Allow your consumers to leave a message and their email address, and assure them that you will respond as quickly as possible.
4. Make good use of proactive chat.
Given the popularity of customer support chat, many businesses want to reach out to customers ahead of time to increase interaction and lend a hand when they look to need it. A proactive message assisting, for example, could be the trigger that converts a consumer who has been waiting at the checkout for a long time. Proactive chats can be manual or automated, depending on pre-defined rules.
Adding proactive live chat to your site can boost visitor confidence by demonstrating a firm commitment to communication between the organization and its consumers.
While proactive chat is a terrific way to enhance chat participation, if it isn't used correctly, it may also destroy visitors' experiences. Proactive chats that are too repetitive, generic, or robotic, or that stand in the way of visitors reading your website's content, may bother and irritate them. Here's how you can avoid this and add proactive chat to your customer service arsenal:
- Create automatic chat rules.
Proactive chat requests should be based on customer research and analysis and should be sent out at the correct time, in the right area, and with the proper message, especially when automated, to prevent annoying customers. Consider characteristics such as client time on site, current location, and navigation history when creating rules to add proactive live chat to your website.
For example, you may design your rules to automatically send proactive chat invitations to consumers who have more than $100 in products in their shopping carts and have spent more than 5 minutes on the checkout page. You can more efficiently contact target visitors who are most likely to become customers by implementing proactive automated chat rules, ensuring that no one targeted visitor is ignored.
Using the proactive chat report to refine your strategy is the greatest way to improve the effectiveness of proactive customer support chat. You can look over the report for a single proactive conversation or all proactive talks, concentrating on parameters like the number of proactive chats sent to visitors, the number of proactive chats accepted by visitors, and the percentage of proactive chats accepted by visitors.
Examine these factors to see if your proactive conversation approach is performing as expected and make any required adjustments to improve it.
5. Create a mobile-friendly live chat system.
Given how connected to their Smartphone today's consumers are, it's becoming increasingly crucial that when you add live chat to your website, it's also accessible and simple to use on mobile devices. Here are the factors we can look forward to:
• Responsive design is a web design that adjusts to the size of the screen.
A website will likely appear differently on a mobile device than it does on a computer screen. On a Smartphone, the original chat button and chat window, which were built to fit your desktop browser, may take up too much space, making navigation of your mobile website difficult.
Your live chat must be responsive to provide an optimal mobile experience. When users approach your website via mobile devices, your live chat is instantly modified in size and layout with full mobile compliance, ensuring the finest customer support chat experience.
- In-App Chat
For most businesses, mobile apps are a must-have service. Rather than purchasing tickets, streaming videos, paying bills, and doing other tasks using a browser, more and more consumers are turning to dedicated mobile apps. As a result, many businesses are now including in-app chat in their mobile apps. Instead of searching for the chat icon on the company's website, users may contact customer service staff directly from the app. Developer-friendly SDKs make it simple to integrate in-app chat into mobile apps (software development kits). Your consumers will be able to contact your customer support on the go—anytime, anywhere—thanks to the creation of mobile-friendly live chat.
Wrap-up
Now that you're equipped with this customer support chat best practices, you'll need to make sure you pick the correct live chat vendor. Consider your use case carefully, figure out the features your agents will require providing great service, and utilizing it as a starting point when selecting a provider.
