5 Live Chat Methods to Support Customers Effectively
Implementing live chat software on your website is a good step towards improving customer support online. This tool has truly revolutionized customer support and helped businesses give an overall better experience to their visitors and customers alike. This is because live chat offers so many possibilities and can be used in so many different ways to help customers.
Because of such a variety of things you can do to support customers, all kinds of different businesses are able to improve their results significantly using live chat.
However, it’s not just about implementing live chat to your site, it’s also about knowing how to use it. If you don’t have the right methods in place, you will not be able to help your customers and your investment will be wasted. Instructing your employees to use live chat properly is essential to leave a great impression on your customers.
Here are some methods that can help you create an efficient customer support channel through live chat.
Make sure that your live chat agents are trained and motivated
A live chat agent that had proper training is the one who will always be motivated. When you put someone without the proper knowledge of what to do and when to do it, you can expect that person to be demotivated. The agents who will handle your live chat support channel need to know everything about your products and services.
On top of that, they need to have the necessary people pleasing skills and the ability to run an online chat session without any problems. A lot of businesses have people who are not properly trained doing this job and they end up with poor chat agents. A good chat agent can handle 5 to 6 conversations at the same time and this takes practice.
This means that customers won’t have to wait for someone to reply to them and give them the help they need. People without proper training can get overwhelmed when talking to so many people and lose motivation to assist them.
Extract valuable information from live chat and use it for your knowledge base
Your live chat support channel will generate a lot of useful information that you can use for improving your whole customer support department. Simply collect transcripts from your chat with visitors and populate your knowledge base by linking them and accompanying them with the proper keywords.
Your live chat agents that work on communicating with people can easily search your knowledge base database and look for questions or problems that people had in the past and quickly get the required information to offer them a good solution.
You need to implement a chat gateway that leads to your knowledge base and make sure that your chat agents are trained to use that gateway as and when required. All chat conversations that lead to successful solutions of problems need to be documented in your knowledge base database, using keywords, so that they can be easily located when people face the same problem in the future.
Canned messages are a must
When a visitor starts a live chat conversation, that person needs to be greeted with utmost courtesy and professionalism. However, it can be exhausting and take a lot of time for your live chat agents to type the same type of messages time and again. Additionally, you want to curtail the workload of your agents, so that they can shine where it really counts.
This is why you should implement automation that will greet people with canned messages. It’s possible to use standardized messages that will allow you to automate parts of conversations you want. However, you should use these messages carefully, given the fact that too many automated messages will make participants think that they are having a conversation with a machine instead of a real person.
Implement a proactive chat that targets people
Visitors that land on your page will not always start a chat conversation on their own and this is why you are the one that has to identify people who may require assistance and start a live chat conversation with them. When this happens, visitors might not want to respond to live chat, but this means nothing bad.
Just by asking people whether or not they need help shows that you have a positive attitude and that you are willing to help. It’s advisable that you give visitors some time to browse pages and see what your site has to offer on their own before you engage with them via live chat.
Make sure to identify those pages where you would like to improve conversion rates and set your chat to pop out after a minute or so. This is how you will give people time to breathe and get oriented on their own. Some people like to try a bit harder to do something on their own before seeking help.
Implement personal chat
Similarly to proactive live chat solutions, personal chat also invites people for a conversation and offers them help. The difference is that it has a more personalized approach towards customers. This is a more engaging invitation, as it has a picture and the name of the person that is willing to talk to them and offer help.
Some organizations have found that personal chat invitations have a greater chance of engaging people in a conversation than those standard automatized invites. Make sure that you encourage all of your live chat agents to try and initiate personal invitations wherever they can.
Conclusion
These are the five methods that can help you improve live chat customer support and allow you to improve conversion rates. The reason why live chat is so effective and popular is because it simulates human interaction online. This means that you can create a unique approach and have a window of opportunity to sell something to people and make them leave your site with a smile on their faces.