In the digital era of e-commerce and social media, customers expect quick replies. Yes, gone are the days where customers would wait for hours to get a revert. 

Study shows that 42% of customers on social media expect a response within 60 minutes. 

From the stats, it’s fair to say that if you snooze, you lose. Your customer support team needs to be on their toes, attending to visitors without any kind of delay. To avoid any mismanagement and streamlined communication, many companies are now adopting live chat tool into their CRM. 

To enhance your customer support team’s performance, you need a live chat tool that connects them with your visitors in real-time. Also, live chat lets you engage in a personalized way to deliver better services. So, let’s find out how a customer support team can benefit from using live chat software. 

1. Offer real-time help to customers  

When it comes to customer support, IVR is a commonly used method of communication between a company and its users. However, do you think that you can achieve higher customer satisfaction with customer call support where they have to stay on hold for hours just to get to the right representative? 

I assume the answer to that would be no; it’s not feasible to expect high customer retention with a fragmented support portal. 

Using live chat, your visitor or customer can reach the right person with just a single click. It eliminates the lengthy process of IVR and provides customized solutions in no time. Therefore, live chat is an ideal tool for every company that wants to keep its customer delighted and capture more leads. 

2. Higher response rate

The best feature of live chat is that it helps you provide immediate assistance to your visitors. In fact, 79% of customers share that they prefer to communicate via live chat because of the immediacy it offers. And that’s something that you certainly shouldn’t neglect. Live chat is currently the most preferred mode of communication among consumers. 

When you’re working with a customer support team, you have sufficient resources to communicate with multiple visitors at a time. You can assign chats to other available support agent so no visitor needs to wait to initiate conversation.  

Failing to provide an instant response may certainly lead to losing business. According to Forrester’s Raising the Bar report, 1 in 5 customers is willing to stop using a product or service due to delayed response during a live chat. With a substantial number of customers relying on instant replies via live chat, it’s crucial to have transparency. Live chat lets your customers know the availability time so they know whether they’d receive a response on weekends or during business hours. 

3. Saves a lot of time

A higher response rate of the live chat tool helps save a lot of time for both parties. According to Zopim’s analysis of over 85k chats, it was revealed that on average, an agent replies to a customer query within 23 seconds, while the average resolution time is less than 42%. Now, that’s a surprising statistic when we’re talking about saving time by using live chat as a conversational tool. 

When the users start receiving such swift replies to their queries, it’ll raise the bar and provide you a competitive edge among others, leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased ROI. 

4. Chat transcripts for better context

To provide enhanced customer service, your customer support team needs to be well acquainted with the common queries and concerns of the customers. They can leverage the existing chat transcript and refer to it for further assistance to their customers. 

Chat transcripts mainly help in providing better context and understanding the needs of your users. The customer support team can utilize the existing chat transcripts and gain knowledge on the commonly asked queries so they can train other support team agents as well and improve their productivity. 

For example, if your company frequently receives questions on the features and their use cases, you can use the chat transcripts to provide immediate responses and solve customer queries within minutes. 

5. Refer to previous conversations and avoid repetition

No customer likes to repeat the same information to another customer support agent. Since your customers are already running out of time, you don’t want to make them go away by asking repetitive questions now and again. 

Live chat consists of robust features, and conversation history is one of the essential features. The live chat tool automatically saves contact history, so the next agent can start off right from where the previous one left the conversation. 

For your ease of use, the entire chat history is saved in live chat, so when you’re moving the deal through the pipeline, and your sales rep wants to get a better understanding of the customer’s requirement, they can also access the conversation history and offer a better value proposition. 

6. Integrate live chat with CRM to get a clear view of your contacts

Live chat, when integrated with CRM, can turn into a robust automation tool for your business. A CRM fetches entire customer data and provides seamless contact management along with powerful workflow automation. 

A live chat support team can leverage the integration of live chat with CRM to study the analytics and gain a better understand of the customer preferences for higher customer retention. By integrating live chat with CRM, you don’t have to worry about manual data entries and spending time on adding contacts to the CRM. 

Automate the entire process and access the data pertaining to your customer’s chat, time and duration inside the CRM. Moreover, you can create contacts from your live chat screen and they will reflect inside your CRM as well, which helps you save more time and focus on being more productive. Now, leverage CRM live chat integration and boost your business. 

7. Avoid any escalation

When you adopt the live chat tool into your company, you need to be well aware of its repercussions as well. Oftentimes, it may happen that the customer is still not satisfied with your response and might escalate the issue. 

In order to avoid such a scenario, you can simply assign the chat to a senior team member so they can get into the issue right away and prevent the escalation. 

You can mention your team member in the chat so they’ll receive notifications and can assist the customer right away. Such immediate actions help save the company’s reputation among potential customers and help build lasting relationships. 

8. Send targeted messages

When you use live chat as a part of an automation tool, you can do much more than engage. Live chat provides actionable insights into the customers’ activities and preferences, so you can find out from which page they contacted you and where they’re stuck. 

Therefore, when you’re adding live chat to different pages on your website, you can customize the description of your chatbox and send targeted messages to the customers. 

9. Live chat with CRM can give you a competitive edge

To stay afloat in a competitive market, you need to gain a competitive edge among your competitors. Out of 1000 companies, only 9% provide live chat option on their website, while the number of customers that use live chat has increased from 38% to 58% in recent years. 

A live chat tool with CRM can help you build long-lasting relationships with your customers and witness significant growth in your business. 

10. Improve retention

A live chat tool is a great way to build solid connections with your visitors. When a customer is satisfied with your services, they’re more likely to stay loyal to a company and refer it to others. 

In return, it can help the company increase the retention rate and build a strong customer base. In fact, live chat increases the customer retention rate by 5% as it results in satisfied customers. Additionally, you can build a good rapport with customer care team members. (source) 

11. Help you categorize customer issues

For a streamlined workflow process, you need to categorize your customers’ queries. And live chat tool enables you to collect the data of common customer queries, get their feedback, and categorize it according to the stage it’s at and the concerned department. 

When a customer comes up with a query, it’s not necessary that it’ll go to the customer support team. For issues such as technical difficulties and bugs, you need to redirect the query to the concerned department. Therefore, you must assess the customer query, classify it into different departments so every team member knows how to handle it. 

Companies that categorize the support tickets and delegate issues to the concerned department are more likely to leave customers satisfied. 

  
12.  Live chat on the website can reduce bounce rate and improve direct engagement

When a visitor isn’t able to find sufficient information on the website, they’re more likely to go back and check out another website. An increase in bounce rate can have a negative impact on the company’s website. 

Therefore, placing a live chat box on the pages where your customers face high difficulties may result in a reduced bounce rate. You can strategize the live chat box placement and make it look catchy. So, when a customer needs any assistance, they can reach out via live chat and get their queries resolved immediately. 

13. Help you collect useful customer feedback

Once you provide the solution your customer is looking for, you can ask for their feedback to see if there’s any aspect you need to improve upon. In fact, you can gather customer’s feedback via NPS as well and check where majority of your customers are lying on the scale.

If your promoters are higher than your detractors, you’ve scored a good place in your customers’ hearts. However, if the result is the opposite, you need to aggressively approach a strategy that focuses on providing better value to customers to increase your brand image.

Final thoughts

In today’s competitive market, one needs to stay on their toes to excel at their business. And the live chat is an essential tool that every company needs to adopt in order to strive.

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