Using Live Chat Apps for Customer Service

In order to provide good customer service, you need to be available to your customers wherever it’s most convenient for them. In many cases, that means connecting with them online.

For customers who are currently shopping or browsing your website, having the ability to chat with them directly on the site can have a lot of benefits. That’s why customer service live chat apps have become so popular over the last few years, particularly with companies or service providers whose offerings are technical or might require some extra explanation.

These apps allow customers to contact customer service reps from companies directly while they are shopping or browsing. Here are some of the benefits of using customer service live chat apps for your business.

Collect Valuable Insights

Customer service live chat apps offer another method for connecting with customers, meaning you can gain valuable information about the customer experience from them. You can then use that information to improve the customer experience in the future.

For example, if customers constantly use the chat feature to ask questions about a certain feature or information they can‘t find on your website, you might need to make that section more prominent.

In addition to getting information from either individual chat experiences or cumulative chat experiences, sending chat users a quick follow-up survey about the chat experience itself can give you a bit extra information and engagement from your customers. When it comes to these follow-up surveys, think super simple like, “Did we answer your question?” and “Please rate your level of satisfaction with the chat support.”

You could even create tags for the surveys to know where your customers are accessing the chat from most, and you could customize the follow-up based on where they accessed chat (giving a different question for those who accessed chat via the catalog versus those who accessed it from the check-out process, etc.).

Build Customer Trust

Another benefit of being constantly available to interact with customers is that they are likely to have a better experience with your company, and thus a higher opinion of you.

If customers know there will always be a representative available to answer questions, they will likely have fewer concerns doing business with you again. And an improved experience through live chat also increases the odds that they will tell others about your company or offerings.

Increase Sales

When customers are shopping on your website, there’s likely to be some confusion during the checkout process at some point. But if you have a customer service live chat feature on your site, they have a way to resolve those issues while checking out. However, if that feature isn’t available, they might just abandon their cart and go buy a similar item from a different site.

In addition, if you’re available to answer questions about products, customers might feel more comfortable making a purchase right away, rather than doing research or shopping around on other sites.

Reduce Service Costs

In addition to potentially increasing sales, customer service live chat apps also have the ability to cut overall service costs. The initial setup can normally be completed in about a day and doesn’t cost much compared to other methods. And once it’s set up, customer service agents can interact with multiple customers at once.

This means that they can spend less time overall on each interaction than they would on the phone. And when customer service live chat features are available, many customers are more likely to use those than to call a customer service number.

So with live chat apps, you can have fewer customer service reps handling the same amount of questions or concerns. Then you can allocate those extra resources elsewhere to help your business, such as analyzing the chat streams and feedback to work on site improvements for your customers!

Chat Photo via Shutterstock