Every interaction customers have with your business shapes their perception about you and can either make them more loyal or send them elsewhere looking for alternatives. That's why it's essential to ensure your customers have the best experience with you at every point of contact. Convenience and efficiency are paramount these days, and one of the most crucial aspects of customer experience is the ability to provide immediate and personalized assistance. This is where live chat comes in as a powerful tool for businesses to offer real-time, personalized assistance to customers.
However, harnessing the full potential of live chat requires more than just implementing a chat widget on your website. This requires businesses to adopt a live chat strategy that prioritizes efficiency, personalization, and proactive problem-solving.
In this blog, we'll be delving into 15 live chat best practices that can help you along the way, and how you can implement them using SalesIQ.
Offer proactive assistance in important web pages or sections of your mobile app
Deploy chatbots to handle the first level of customer support
Lower your response time with time-saving live chat features
Integrate your live chat tool with your CRM and help desk software
Let's now look at each of these in detail.
Live chat best practices
1. Place your live chat widget right
For any of your live chat best practices to work, people need to know you have live chat on your website or mobile app. People generally look for a live chat option at the bottom right-hand side of webpages or mobile apps, as that’s become a common practice. This also ensures that it's non-intrusive while still being in a visitor's natural field of vision.
2. Check customer interaction history before a chat
Returning customers don’t like having to reintroduce themselves and repeat their purchase history with you time and again. Check customer details and their chat history to ensure you have their details on hand before a chat. This helps you understand the context and provide personalized assistance without asking them too many questions. It also helps you align with previously made promises and resolutions and ensure a consistent customer experience.
3. Offer proactive assistance in important web pages or sections of your mobile app
Visitors may not always reach out to you for help. Proactively reach out to prospects in high-intent pages with a greeting relevant to the visitor's web path and the current page they're on. It's also important to get the timing right so that your messages aren't obstructing the user experience or you don't wait too long and lose the prospect. For example, if a prospect has been on your pricing page for 20 seconds, ask them if they’d like a pricing breakdown.
4. Deploy chatbots to handle the first level of customer support
This is a live chat customer service best practice that helps scale your customer support and enhances its efficiency. Set up a custom chatbot with absolutely no coding to assist your customers with routine inquiries and clarifications or even gather information about the problem the customer needs help with, and solve it or pass it to a human agent for further assistance.
Check out our detailed article on chatbot use cases for customer service to learn how best you can leverage chatbots to scale your customer support operation.
5. Route chats to the right agents
First-contact resolution (FCR) is one of the most essential aspects in customer service. Customers don't like being passed around from agent to agent, and highly value having their issues resolved promptly during their first interaction with customer support. Boost your FCR by routing incoming chats to the agents with the right expertise to solve their query, while also balancing agent workload to ensure responsiveness.
6. Add a personal touch to your responses
Turn every chat conversation into a more engaging experience by adding personal elements like addressing your customers by their name, expressing empathy, adopting a conversational tone, offering personalized recommendations based on their preferences, expressing gratitude for their patience and understanding, and showing genuine appreciation for their business. This live chat support best practice fosters a sense of connection and rapport, laying the foundation for a meaningful customer relationship and loyalty.
7. Create a comprehensive live chat knowledge base
Creating a knowledge base consisting of answers to commonly asked questions, help articles, step-by-step guides, etc is a live chat support best practice with dual benefits and helps both customers and live chat agents.
Firstly, your customers can find answers to their questions independently, reducing their dependency on your customer support team and providing instant gratification. Second, it makes your customer support team more efficient as agents can quickly look up solutions and share them in response to customer queries. The load on your team also reduces, giving them more time to handle customers who do reach out.
8. Lower your response time with time-saving live chat features
Live chat is synonymous with immediate responses, and that's exactly what customers expect when they reach out to you. So another important best practice in live chat is using time-saving live chat features such as canned responses—pre-written responses that can be used in a click—and typing preview—viewing what the customer is typing in the input field of your live chat window—to reduce your response time and respond quicker to customers. Along with these, AI-powered smart suggestions—automatic response suggestions for customer queries from your canned responses and knowledge base—can also save you a great deal of time.
9. Switch to audio calls and screen sharing for complex queries
Customer support often involves situations where chats won't suffice or it may take too long to explain a problem or its solution through chat, and verbal explanation or visual demonstration becomes necessary. In such cases, it's always a good idea to switch your chat session to an audio call or a screen share session. You can also help customers with our remote support powered by Zoho Assist.
10. Integrate live chat with all your messaging channels
Accessibility is an essential element of customer service in today's business world. Improve your customer support accessibility by allowing customers to reach you through different touchpoints like your website, mobile app, and instant messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Instagram, and manage them all from a single place by integrating all these channels with your live chat software.
11. Support customers in multiple languages
Multilingual support is paramount in today's interconnected world, where a global clientele is a given. Providing multilingual support demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity and accessibility and helps you create an instant connection with customers. Hiring live chat agents for multiple regions may not be practical. Instead, use real-time chat translation to get your customers' messages and your responses translated to your language of choice. You can also automate your global customer support operation with multilingual chatbots.
12. Set your live chat status
Another important best practice in live chat support is setting an offline status for your live chat widget outside of business hours. A live chat widget on your website or mobile app signifies instant support, and nothing can frustrate a customer more than failing to respond to live chat messages. Set up an offline status message to be displayed when your team is unavailable so customers know when to expect a response.
13. Train your live chat agents effectively
Training your live chat agents effectively is crucial for providing exceptional customer service and maximizing the benefits of live chat support. Ensure your agents are equipped to handle all possible scenarios in customer support live chat—from assisting customers with routine enquiries to handling angry or difficult customers.
Start by laying down clear procedures, standards, and KPIs for your live chat operation. Train your team to adhere to these and monitor them regularly with live chat reports. You can also set up monitors to view your team's customer chats and listen to calls in real time, and provide feedback or even join an ongoing chat or call when you need to step in.
14. Integrate your live chat tool with your CRM and help desk software
Revolutionize your customer service live chat operation by integrating your live chat tool with your CRM and help desk software. This allows you to access relevant customer information like past interactions, purchase history, preferences, and their experience with your support team and tailor your conversation accordingly. You can also convert a chat to a support ticket for further assistance or set up follow-up tasks.
15. Collect post-chat feedback
Even after incorporating all these live chat customer service best practices, how do you know if they're working for you? By asking your customers. Collect regular feedback from your customers immediately after a chat ends to understand what they think about your service quality and analyze this data to determine what aspects of customer service you're lacking in, what's working and what's not, and to improve your live chat support continuously.
Put these live chat best practices into use with Zoho SalesIQ
Zoho SalesIQ is advanced live chat software with audio calling and screen sharing capabilities, a chatbot platform, multichannel and multilingual support, agent training features, and analytics capabilities that help businesses deliver consistently good customer service across all channels.
Implement the customer service live chat best practices discussed in this blog with SalesIQ. Sign up now for a 15-day free trial with no financial commitment.
Tell us in the comments below if you've incorporated any of these best practices in your live chat operation. You can also share any additional live chat best practices you follow.
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