Live Chat To Improve Your Customer Experience

Live Chat : In the midst of such a fast-paced world, we find ourselves running frantically – to and fro and jumping from one activity to another – leaving us with little free time to pause and take a deep breath. As a result, companies are increasingly faced with the question:  “How can I interact with my customer quickly, but at the same time be assertive and attractive?”.

According to research,  customers’ communication preferences are changing. However, there is one thing that all customers – regardless of their demographic profiles – seem to agree on: 55% of consumers are inclined to resolve their questions and needs online.

Discover how to stay connected with your customers effectively and throughout the purchase process.

Why Is It Important To Pay Attention To The Online Service That Your Company Offers?

Regardless of the market or industry, your business operates in, chances are, a huge proportion of your consumers are already online. Whether they’re researching, sharing information, or purchasing a product or service, your customers expect you to be available 24/7.

For this reason, it is important to be accessible to your users, at all times and from all the main points of contact between your company. And not only that, but it is also essential that the above happens quickly and efficiently. After all, according to a survey by Zendesk,  50% of consumers choose to engage through one channel or another based on how quickly they think they’ll get a response, and 72.5% of users say solving a problem quickly is what is most important to them in an interaction with a brand.

Due to the above,  younger generations – such as Millennials and Generation Y – are so focused on self-service channels, which generally provide quick responses and a refreshing degree of autonomy for users to solve their problems. , on their own, without having to contact a service agent.

How is it possible to satisfy your customers in a better way? Through an efficient and scalable solution that can be easily consulted by users and that provides all the relevant information for them in a single place and without friction. And – you guessed it – that’s precisely what live chat does.

What Is A Live Chat?

Live chat is a feature (or widget ) that can be set up on your website or app so that your customers can instantly chat with your business. When clicked, a window opens and the chat starts immediately. In most cases, these chats are integrated with bots so they can be more scalable. 

The interesting thing about all this is that it is estimated that this functionality can resolve up to 91% of user complaints compared to only 31.8% of “Contact Us” sections or buttons and/or emails.

This type of technology can have several benefits and characteristics such as the following:

• Quick Answers –  Have you ever seen that little window that pops up when you enter a website that usually says something like,  “Hi, how can I help today?” This is a welcome message that you can set in your live chat within your website or app. Additionally, the conversation can be configured so that the user has the feeling of being on a waiting list or, even better, to provide valuable information in advance.
• Smart Triggers:  These are predetermined rules -or algorithms- to start a chat, based on customer behavior. For example, activation can arise when a user clicks on a certain button or CTA ( call to action ) or when they visit a specific page on the website or even when they reach a certain time spent on the same tab.
• Bots:  They are the most common resource added to a live chat because they provide much more agility and scalability to responses and services. They are computer programs that use artificial intelligence or a set of predefined keywords to simulate a conversation with the user .

Live chats offer businesses the opportunity to be present and available to customers at different points in the buying process, building instant yet lasting relationships. For example, a user may enter a live chat to inquire about the scope of a given banking service while still being informed about the options available to him. But he may also be having trouble unlocking his new credit card or need help getting service, all at the same time! For all of these points (and hundreds of others), live chats can help.

Benefits Of Using A Live Chat 

Today, live chat is helping organizations transform the online customer journey. For this and more, a live chat set up on your website or app can help you:

• Provide real-time customer support ;

• Assist the purchase process by actively guiding visitors or customers in their decision-making. To give you an idea,  customers who chat through live chats usually buy -on average- between 10% and 15% more than other customers ;

• Create a sales  and  lead funnel, converting visitors into potential customers;

• Increase user loyalty and satisfaction ;

• Create more intuitive online journeys  that reduce bounce and abandon rates and offer a better user experience;
• Encourage customers to recommend your brand more frequently due to their high degree of satisfaction.

Online chats and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence and the use of chatbots have become a necessity for businesses as more and more customers turn to digital channels to interact with and buy from brands. Therefore, implementing an AI chatbot in your live chat makes this mission much easier and smoother; after all, it enables proactive service and fast, scalable query resolution.

Connecting your AI chatbot to your cloud contact center also allows you to set up seamless handoff of support cases to service agents to handle more complex or prioritized queries.

In short, using an AI chatbot in a live chat allows you to:

• Offer  24/7 support  for your users;

• Encourage  user self-service, reducing the number of support tickets;

• Enable simultaneous and scalable attention, alleviating the workload within your call center;

• Facilitate intelligent routing, that is, the transfer of users to service agents with specific skills based on user questions and intent;

• Offer automated responses, considerably reducing the first response time of calls.

In other words, communication with your customers, powered by AI, could significantly reduce the operating costs of your contact center; which will help you achieve some of what should be your key business goals: engage more with your audience and -of course- continue to grow.

5 Tips To Implement An Online Chat In Your Company

1. Use a conversational and humanized tone: People want all interactions they have with companies to be natural and humanized. For this reason, the recommendation is that -whether you are using a bot or human agents- phrases that are truly conversational are used. The use of emojis and gifs can help in this regard!
2. Try to help the user – and you will get more and better sales as a consequence. Remember that a user may contact your company at many stages in their buying process, so your intention with a live chat should be to help the user clear or solve their question or problem. Additionally, try to be helpful instead of trying to sell at all times or you will end up affecting the customer experience. Become an enabler and sales will be an organic consequence of it.
3. Continually evaluate your AI chatbot implementation –  As we already mentioned, an AI chatbot can particularly help you scale your service and the speed with which your team provides support. Monitor its performance closely and you will be able to optimize it, step by step!
4. Integrate your live chat with your contact center: so your customers can enjoy true contextualized and personalized omnichannel experiences.
5. Understand what your customers’ preferred channels are: Live chats are commonly added to business websites and apps. But you can evaluate the insertion of other chat channels with your users -such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and SMS, among others-. The important thing is to be where your customers want you to be, at all times.