Most businesses use live Chat primarily as a tool to engage their customers. When you look at it from the perspective of customer support, you will find it to be an invaluable addition to your arsenal.

At the same time, live chat is much more than what it appears to be. A large number of businesses are starting to use live chat for innovative and out-of-the-box uses, other than just being a ticketing system, and absolutely meeting the needs of their clients while also boosting customer loyalty.

Let’s look at the multitude of ways in which organizations are using a conventional live chat box.

Tune your live chat into a suggestion box
Customer suggestions are a gold mine that enables you to not only meet the needs of your customers but also exceed their expectations.

Live chat can be pro-actively used to gather valuable suggestions and feedback about your products, services, and your customers’ experience on your website. There are two important benefits of using a live chat option apart from it just being a medium for responding to customer queries.

• It provides you with valuable and actionable insight into building a better product.
• It allows you to develop brand loyalty by proving to your customers that their suggestions and feedbacks are valued.

Allow bug reporting in real-time
This can be a very clever use of your live chat tool.

Live chat can allow you to correctly assess and evaluate situations, like the launch of a new product or service, as bugs are commonplace during such situations. Many chat tools can be pre-configured to gather debugging information about a system, such as the operating system or the type of browser used to access the website.

This enables your support team to procure much-needed technical data and squash any kind of bugs in a swift and strategic manner. Thus, you obtain one more way of using live chat for purposes other than a live chat ticketing system.

Follow-up with your customers on purchases
You can take live chat a step further than simply getting into conversations with your customers until after the resolution takes place. Following up with customers through an appropriate channel (email, social media or even live chat when they visit next) and ensuring their satisfaction can go a long way in ensuring customer loyalty.

Collect leads discreetly, and cross-sell and up-sell
Live chat provides an incredible way of collecting leads without cluttering your email inbox. Your business can use live chat to collect leads by getting into conversations with people who are visiting your website and ensuring they get the information they are looking for. It also enables you to continue the conversation and cross-sell or up-sell another product that they just might need.

Make it proactive, not reactive
This is the real brilliance of live chat, as you get to collect leads without hindering the overall customer experience. Nobody likes unsavory ads and lead forms plaguing their navigational experience on the website. Make your website devoid of all such distasteful ads and let them pro-actively reach out to you.

Live chat in so many ways is a platform in itself that enables you to tell the story of your brand. The evolution of live chat from a tool that was a part of customer support software, or just a simple ticketing software, to an indispensable business tool has been organic.

Answering questions is not the only purpose that your live chat serves; instead, it is now a platform that allows you to foster brand loyalty and create experiences worth revisiting.

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