Why Your Company Support Team Really Needs Live Chat

Live chat is an application or software which allows any member of staff within an organization to directly chat with visitors on their company website.

Software for live chatting is more than just a nice feature to have. On the contrary, it has now become an essential part of almost every business website that you can possibly find.

Many businesses still rely on phone calls to solve the queries of their customer, but in this age where food gets ordered just with one swipe; individuals might not be ready to put in that much effort to call on your company helpline for a simple query. They might instead prefer to shoot their questions via text messaging because it saves them from making awkward phone calls and waiting for a long time giving up their work.

Although emails enable smart communication, the process is not as smooth and quick; and in a single word, not convenient for a customer who is currently on your website and considering to purchase your products or services. Instant messaging therefore helps!

If you really want to understand how the addition of a Live chat software on your website can benefit your business then take a look at the following points:

1. Your customers can multitask now

You must admit that how talking on the phone with someone demands all your attention and time. And the worst thing is, some customer call numbers keep their customers on hold making them listen to annoying loud music!

If you add a live chat option your customers can continue working at their computer, or writing emails and even scroll the news while a customer representative staff replies to their queries.

Eventually, when the staff will reply back they will hear the alert and then they will turn their attention towards it.

2. Some customers prefer instant messaging

There are many people out there who don’t want to talk to strangers over the phone. With texting becoming hugely popular, taking over the phone has lost its charm and is becoming outdated. Young people mostly have grown so fond of the convenience of texting that they feel lethargic to give a call. Live chat is a real-time interaction feature you should add on your website so that your customers can be at ease while talking to the customer rep.

3. Effective for your business

Can anyone talk over the phone with multiple people about different issues at the same time? No, right? While it might be easier for your customer service agent to guide your customer about a problem over the phone, but at that time he/she cannot take up more calls.

But if you decide to add live chat, your agent can converse with many customers on the go, depending on the complexity of the problems. If you consider operating a call center for your business, the expenses will be on the higher side. The cost and maintenance of the phones and the bills coming from the telephone company will force you to spend high.

4. All chats are recorded

Earlier when individuals used to call the customer care numbers the call as recorded by the company only for their sake and the individuals didn’t have any recordings of the call with them. But now the customer can wish to transcript the calls for their purpose. This would be extremely helpful for not only you but also your customers.

Also, when helping repeat customers the agent can just refer to the chat without having to request the customer to repeat issues. Eventually, this can save the customer’s time and will not also add to their frustrations.

5. Very quick

Usually, live chats connect customers to customer service agents much quickly than calls. A Customer hates when they hear a busy tone and have to wait for a few long minutes to finally talk to the representative to share their problems. The faster the customer can connect to the agent the happier and more satisfied he will be.

6. Economical for the customer

Many customers have limited phone balance on their phone and having to wait for a few minutes might exhaust their balance completely.

Also, everyone, these days have an internet plan on their phone and thus texting would not be a problem. When a customer can solve their query without having to spend a single penny, they will always recommend your customer service to everyone they know.

7. Offer more service hours to the customers

With the traditional call support, the customer service department would have to be shut down along with the official hours. But if you decide to make your website more customer-friendly with live chat then you can even assign your employees a few hours of work even after the office hours are over. Some employees might prefer this way of overtime as they can be anywhere and doing anything while being available for the service for the customers.

8. You can gather additional data

One huge advantage of a live chat tool is that it helps you to preserve all the additional but important info. You can find out a ton of things including:

· Whether your customers are idle or active during the chat

· Whether the customer has just visited your site

· The operating system of your customer

Obtaining this data would help you to determine how to respond to the messages sent. Since you have all the transcripts of the messages you can search for keywords by running software on the conversations. These keywords would point out which problem is coming out most frequently and the effective solutions of it.

Accordingly, you can also suggest the same solutions to your customer without taking much time to actually solve the problem all over again!

9. It can increase sales

Live chat software is designed in a way so that they can trigger chats made by potential customers. This is done based on certain behaviors of the customers. Like for example, if a customer goes through your pricing ranges, a chat popup will appear saying ‘how can I help you today’? Now the customer doesn’t have to ping the business separately and thus their time and efforts would be saved. Eventually, the customer will be lured to buy the products or services thereby increasing the sales of your business.

10. Discover the pains of customer

Before live chat became popular, customer service mainly revolved around phone calls and sometimes emails. The pain point is a serious issue that hasn’t been solved yet or at times, not been addressed even. As traditional communication mediums are handled by one member the problems didn’t get the chance to make its way to the supervisors and administrators.

But in live chat, all the supervisors have all the chat histories and it also can be quickly sorted to find the customer pain points. Therefore the management can quickly address and resolve the problems thereby looking out for the needs of the customers. This will satisfy the customers as it would make them feel that how the company cherishes them.

Apart from all the listed advantages, Live Chat Software will also be of great benefit to your employees as they will be able to access and improve their performance reports.

Why Your Company Support Team Really Needs Live Chat was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.