A solid customer support service is the cornerstone of any consumer-facing business. Providing responsive customer care is essential to creating a positive experience for customers, fostering brand loyalty, and growth in the customer base.
Employing live chat customer service has several advantages for your clientele as well as your company itself. Live chat is a crucial component of today’s business operations, providing an essential crucial channel for customers to interact with a company to receive real-time support. In fact, statistics show that live chat increases the likelihood of customers returning to a website by 63%. According to another study, customer satisfaction ratings for live chat is as high as 85%, coming just second to phone support at 91%.
Let’s take a closer look at why live chat integration with customer support systems should be viewed as a requisite for businesses across industries in this age of digital transformation.
Contents Table
What Is Live Chat Customer Support?
Simply stated, live chat support serves as a platform for customers and support representatives to engage with each other in real-time.
Customers can communicate with support staff members using live chat assistance and send inquiries to a support team member who can immediately respond to them within the same communication channel using live chat technology integrated into the business’s website.
In addition, support agents can leverage the integration of live chat to create sales and revenue opportunities like sales conversations, product/service recommendations, plan upgrades, etc.
What Makes a Great Live Chat Customer Service?
For a business to offer the best live chat customer service to the customer, it must ensure that responses are timely, self-explanatory, and precise. Live chat customer support solutions enable agents to offer a personalized problem-solving experience to customers.
Find more about how it’s done in the subsequent section.
What Are the Benefits of Integrating Live Chat with Customer Support Operations?
Here are seven key advantages that live chat integration offers businesses and enhances their overall customer service prospects.
Enhanced Customer Experience
By offering customer support online chat services, businesses provide customers a means of contacting them right when the customer faces any queries or issues that they are unable to resolve on their own.
It is considerably more satisfying than emailing or raising a ticket on the website to get in touch with the support team because you never know when you’ll hear back from them.
Increases Conversion by Building Customer Trust in he Brand
Live chat is a fantastic solution to engage with potential and new customers and give them the assurance they require to buy and utilize a company’s product or make a purchase from its website.
According to research, consumers who utilize chat are 2.8 times more inclined to get converted compared to those who don’t.
Even if consumers don’t need to communicate right away, a brand making itself always accessible to them fosters trust.
Helps Cultivate an Enduring Relationship with Customers
Customer support agents can gauge a customer’s attitude and sentiment during a live chat and adapt their responses as appropriate. This way, agents can effectively create rapport and a supportive, cordial relationship by imitating tone or changing formality to suit a customer.
Additionally, chat systems provide a more genuine alternative than conventional platforms to highlight the personality traits of the business personnel.
Provide Instant Support
Customers don’t like waiting, and every minute matters when they seek assistance from the business to address their issues. Live chat is the secret to providing prompt responses and enables support agents to resolve customer concerns on the go.
Real-time chat capability allows the team to access what the customer is typing before they post it and provide speedier responses by using pre-recorded responses.
Boosts Customer Engagement
Generally, customer support teams witness more conversations once they make live chat accessible. While a proportion of that might come from consumers who move to use chat instead of other mediums, a significant chunk of the increase will come from those who discovered chat and figured out they could seek assistance easily instead of losing hope.
This way, a business could prevent customers from completely disengaging with the company’s product/service.
Thus, a possibility to leave a favorable impact and encourage customers to stay longer arises with higher levels of customer engagement.
An effective tip here would be to introduce the agent personally and keep a conversational tone to foster a welcoming atmosphere.
Improves the Customer Support Team’s Productivity
Live chat allows a support agent to multitask, while on-call & email support demands complete focus on one customer. The agent can easily handle several chat lines involving precise and simple queries simultaneously. While more complicated customer matters that require a deeper look and reporting can be filtered out and assigned to specialized agents.
Ideally, companies should prefer a customer support integration solution that streamlines all customer service channels within one application so that agents can concentrate in one spot and complete the task at hand.
Businesses Can Commit to 24/7 Support
When businesses expand their instant accessibility to include the whole day and even weekends, customers experience a quicker address of their queries even when they arise during odd hours.
If 24 hours a day personalized chat isn’t feasible for a company, it can deploy self-service solutions containing valuable content and information about the product. This way, customers can guide themselves easily at any time and not feel overlooked.
Conclusion
Right now, there is no greater approach to achieving excellence consistently and keeping customers returning than through live chat. Hence, businesses must implement live chat services to maintain an edge over their competition, improve customer satisfaction and retention levels, and consequently witness their sales and revenue climb.
If you are considering adding live chat to your website or mobile application, speak to a consultant at QuickBlox. We provide chat APIs and SDKs that can be easily integrated into any application allowing real-time communication.
