One of the biggest frustrations of running a business where much of your customer interaction is handled remotely via a website, is the limited ability to react to your customers’ needs until it is too late. During busy times, when your customer help phone lines are jammed, you know you will be losing potential sales with every dropped call but feel powerless to do anything about it. If you’re not attracting enough interest, you can spend a lot of time scratching your head over analytics without really knowing where the problem lies.
This is why we are seeing an increasing number of businesses embracing live chat support. There are various live chat services available, both software and cloud-based, each offering new and exciting ways to track and engage with visitors to your website.
Work faster and smarter with Live Chat Support
Business owners are always looking for ways to improve speed and efficiency, and live chat support can help in many ways. The flexibility of the live chat platform frees up your customer-facing agents to perform more simultaneous tasks. Answering phone call questions is resource-intensive because once an agent is engaged on a call there is little else they can do without risking missing important parts of the conversation. With live chat, everything is there in front of you on a chat screen and most agents will be able to handle numerous chats at the same time even while attending to other duties.
Live chat application can also be a helpful tool in the development of your business by allowing you to resolve problems quickly. By integrating live chat with your analytics program you can reach out to customers at the exact time they are experiencing problems and actually have them describe to you what is happening.
Demonstrate your brand values
All too often, a business relies on communicating its brand values solely through the design of its logo, marketing materials and website. But it is a well-known business adage that customers buy from people and not brands. With live chat, you can take full control of your brand image by demonstrating your core values and principles through your customer interactions. To take advantage of this benefit, your customer service agents need to be well-trained in how they are expected to address visitors.
By adding a live chat option, your business is already demonstrating a commitment to using state-of-the-art technology to quickly answer questions and solve problems with a personal touch.
Control and Customization
To be empowered, a business needs to be able to control the manner in which live chat is incorporated into their existing framework. Most quality live chat services offer a high degree of customization with powerful yet simple to use features that can be turned on and off as needed including automatic invitations, pre-set responses, language translation and file-sharing . Business owners may be able to set up internal departments, assign agent roles, receive agent performance reports and block nuisance IP addresses. Design is another area that can often be customized so that a company’s live chat window blends seamlessly in with the rest of their website.
Knowledge is Power
Not only does live chat give businesses the benefit of instant customer contact, it also helps in the accumulation of valuable information via chat archives. Every recorded chat session adds information that can be collated and analyzed to identify patterns that point the way to further refinement. By combining the rich, qualitative data of real customer interactions with the powerful number-crunching capability of analytics software, businesses can be more flexible, responsive and effective, giving them an edge over their competitors.