It’s not easy to sum up the role of a live chat service, but we’ll give it a try in this article:
- Live chat lets customers get fast, instant support, simplifying routine tasks and offering a solid knowledge base. As you can imagine, this is a major business advantage. According to a survey by Forrester, “of all self-service channels, customers make the most frequent use of knowledge bases.”
- It lets organizations connect with customers and answer queries instantly: in fact, McKinsey data predicts that “three-quarters of online customers expect help within five minutes”.
- Live chat is the ‘preferred’ communication channel among millennials: data from Comm100 shows that millennials prefer to talk to someone when they need information.
- It has a higher satisfaction rate: according to a report, customer satisfaction rates for chat are generally higher than for all other support channels, probably thanks to the speed and nature of the conversation.
Clearly, chat services are driving the customer service space forward, making the customer experience fast, accurate and seamless. Now that we understand the benefits of using a chat service, let’s look at how you can use it to gain a business advantage.
7 ways to leverage your chat software to improve the customer experience
1. Offer real-time support
“Most adults (66%) say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with a good online customer experience.” – Forrester
As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest advantages of chat services is that they offer instant, 24/7 support. Take a look at Modcloth’s live chat feature: shoppers can chat one-on-one with a ‘Modcloth advocate’ (which adds a personal touch) and get quick answers to all their questions:
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But what can you do if you have lots of customers and can’t attend to them all instantly? Take Nike’s chat service, for example, which offers customers fast support:
The system asks whether the customer is waiting for a product, to speed up support and hand the conversation over to a human agent if needed.
Another interesting example is Nikon’s chat service, which helps solve basic issues and delivers a seamless CX:
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2. Offer a community-driven experience
Would you believe us if we said a chat system could be used to personalize the customer service experience? Sephora’s use case is worth mentioning here:
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The brand cleverly integrates a ‘collaborative live chat’ into its website to create a sense of ‘community’ where shoppers can chat with each other. As TokyWoky, a French startup, has pointed out: “customers who interact with each other are four times more likely to buy”. Need we say more?
3. Turn website visitors into leads
Picture this scenario for a second: a new customer lands on your website and is immediately greeted by a high-quality, friendly and informative chat system, like American Eagle’s Aerie:
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Without being annoying or intrusive, the bot lists a few areas of interest the visitor can choose to explore. Pretty creative, right?
The customer chooses the “Bra fit and care tips” option, and the bot quickly replies with useful information:
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Throughout the conversation, the bot offers a limited list of options for the customer to choose from, instead of answering questions customers have typed in, which could lead to information gaps, inaccurate answers and so on. Customers will probably think of Aerie right away the next time they think of lingerie. Underlining Aerie‘s success, the company’s technology manager said:
“Within weeks, our chatbots acquired more than double the average number of users we add monthly across all social channels combined. We’re thrilled to see the high adoption rate of our chatbots and the benefits they’re bringing to our customers.”
4. Integrate your chat service with your CRM and databases
“‘Fabulous customer service’ sounds like a user-centered strategy, but it’s usually just a company-centered approach masked as user-centered. The function of customer service is to support and enable users to not just feel better, but be better.” – Kathy Sierra, Badass: Making Users Awesome
If you want to offer customers a more personalized, contextual experience, integrating your chat service with your database or CRM could be a very interesting option.
For example, you could add customers’ names or other additional information automatically. You’ll have critical information such as contact details, order history, buying behavior patterns, past complaints and so on. Integrating your customer database into your chat system can go a long way toward improving the quality of your customer service. Naturally, your customers will feel more valued, heard and appreciated.
Let’s take the Hipmunk chatbot, ‘Hello Hipmunk’, as an example:
This bot mimics a live agent and lets customers easily book hotels and flights. Here’s what Hipmunk’s CEO said about the bot’s success:
“Hello Hipmunk helped us learn a lot about our travelers’ expectations and also paved the way for building the new travel chatbot, the Slack-based SAP Concur Travel bot.”
One of the team members who built this system commented: The chatbot is accurate, concise and really “understands” what users are asking. It also improves the user experience by integrating a seamless visual interface, strategically placed buttons and attractive images that encourage users to “Share information” and help the system learn more. The chat also receives information about the customer’s location. This removes the need to answer routine questions like “Which airport do you want to fly to? Where are you right now?” Small tweaks and improvements like these can greatly enhance the customer experience and build loyalty.
Useful tip: connect your chat to your CRM so your sales team can follow up on leads and increase conversions.
5. Increase satisfaction and build loyalty
A seamless customer experience is a great example of how to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Take eBay’s ShopBot, for example:
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The Facebook Messenger bot acts as a helpful virtual guide, there to help every user whenever they need it. This system is helping increase engagement with customers and visitors.
According to an eBay spokesperson: “Shopping bots can help in moments when traditional search engines don’t fully meet consumer needs, and can fill the gaps when human agents aren’t available”.
Makes a lot of sense, right?
6. Increase credibility and trust
Considered the golden rule of chat functionality, the world’s top brands send chat transcripts to users to build credibility and trust. Yes, you read that right.
This ensures everyone is on the same page, or in this case, in the same chat, to avoid confusion and misunderstandings. Plus, customers can reread the conversation at any time without having to contact the company again and again. Doing this will increase your customers’ trust and can help you optimize your resources.
Summary: For a positive, authentic experience, we recommend emailing chat transcripts to your customers.
7. Increase user retention
A study published online found that “adding in-app chat services increases engagement by 3x”. But what do we mean by in-app chat services? Basically, you can integrate your chat system into your app so users get faster support. Also, here are two tips to help you design your strategy:
- Your chat service should offer quality, real-time support. Visitors should see that they can get help whenever they need it, whether on your website or in your app.
- You can place support on key product pages and start a solid onboarding process to educate users about the key features of your offering. This will also increase engagement and help your brand build a deeper relationship with users.
Take, for example, the proactive chat service Ruffwear built, which meets visitors’ specific needs on particular pages of its website, such as its guide to choosing and fitting dog boots:
Final thoughts
It’s always worth remembering the old saying every salesperson knows: “Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price”. – Lauren Freedman
If there’s one thing you should take away from this blog, it’s this: if you want to improve your customer experience strategy, it’s not enough to offer exemplary support or have resourceful employees on your team, nor to use technology in isolation to provide support and let machines solve everything on their own.
You need to blend technology with human warmth, and speed with quality. Your customers want fast help, but they also want effective help, with relevant information that helps them solve their problems.
Author’s Bio:
Dhruv Mehta is a Digital Marketing Professional who works at Acquire and provides solutions in the digital era. In his free time, he loves to write on tech and marketing. He is a frequent contributor to Tweak Your Biz. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Live chat is just one piece of a broader communication strategy: find out what conversational marketing is and how to use it to improve your customer experience. And if you’re also looking to centralize all that information, our article Do you really need a CRM? Mailrelay could be it is a good guide to help you decide.
Chat is just one more piece of a well-designed customer journey.