How to Use Live Chat for Perfect Customer Experience

What is the best way to improve growth in your business? 

Apart from adopting the latest technology and tools, improving customer experience is also a top priority. Marketing Insider Group says, “80% of U.S. customers would pay more for a product or service to ensure a superior customer experience”. Businesses that deliver a great customer experience (CX) outgrows those do not.

A great CX strategy makes your existing customers more valuable by improving the customer life cycle while at the same time making it easier and less costly to acquire new customers. CX being the pulse of every business touches all facets ranging from customer satisfaction, loyalty, and brand positioning.

So, now the question is which channel provides the most RoI (return of investment) when it comes to delivering the best customer experience? Live chat is by far the best channel for increasing customer experience. Forrester says, “30% of customers expect live chat on your website.” 

The bottom line is that businesses can enhance live chat customer engagement significantly that boosts customer satisfaction. But before we go deeper into how it impacts CX, let us understand what is live chat and how it works?

8 proven ways how live chat delivers perfect customer experience (CX)

Live chat has many benefits to boost sales conversion and accelerate the growth of your business. Let’s discuss some practical strategies to use live chat for customer engagement that will deliver an exceptional customer experience.

1.  Live chat converts your website visitors into leads

Websites are the main source of your brand image. Visitors interact first with your brand via the website. Live chat offers a great opportunity to engage website visitors while they are on your site. It increases website conversions by 45% because of offering instant customer service. 

How to use live chat sales assistance to increase customer experience?

Businesses can track their website visitors and effectively convert them into leads by triggering right and timely messages. If you offer better customer experience to your first time visitors, they will become your potential customers. 

Emarketer says, “63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat”. 

Integrating live chat with CRM software collects and stores information such as contact details, order history from all the website visitors and customers to build customer profiles. It becomes easy for your agents to access the customer profiles when they return to chat again. 

Protips: 

• You can connect live chat with CRM tools so that your sales team can instantly follow-up with prospects.
• Implement chatbots for collecting visitor information so that conversation can be started with customers based on their previous or pending requests. It is appreciated by customers and makes them feel valued. Such efforts deliver a better customer experience.

2. Live chat reduces the response time 

Response time plays a vital component of good customer service. 82% of consumers say the number one factor that leads to a great customer service experience is having their issues resolved quickly.

Generally, most of the customers abandon an online transaction if their questions or concerns are not addressed fast. The two most common customer service frustrations are:

• Waiting for a sales or support representative 
• Being put on hold for a long time

Live chat is the most preferred software by businesses to deliver real time responses to customers. It is a complete customer service toolkit that includes live engagement tools like co-browsing and video chat that delivers interactive support experience.

How does live chat support enhance customer experience?

• The online chat offers the lowest queue time compared to other customer service channels. 
• It allows multiple conversations by making it a cost-effective support channel.
• With live chat, conversations are routed across the right departments and agents quick resolution.
• Live chat empowers your team to have proactive conversations with customers and help them in their journey.

Businesses implementing the best live chat solution has witnessed a significant speed in responding to customers. When the response time is less, it means better customer satisfaction. 

Tips to follow:

• You can increase live chat customer satisfaction by instant resolution of the problem in an interactive manner.
• Implementing live chat tool helps to respond to customers’ queries instantly. It bolsters customer service agent skills and empowers the team to handle multiple conversations at the same time. Thus, customers get an immediate response without waiting for a long time.

3. Chatbot automation to boost your customer experience  

With chatbot automation, you can enhance live chat customer satisfaction by handling simple queries 24×7. It works hand in hand with agents by collecting customer details before transferring the conversation to the right agent. 

Innovation & Digital Transformation leader Oliver Laborde says “Chatbots are making their way into the landscape of customer relations with the opportunity and promise to offer a better customer experience. 

“Chatbots are key tools of good integrated customer experiences.” – Olivier Ezratty

Bots help to deliver a great customer experience by following ways:

• 24×7 support – With chatbots, you can engage your customers 24×7 by answering their simple queries and increase customer satisfaction.
• Reduce help desk support tickets – With bots managing the common queries (like asking the delivery date) the number of support tickets reduces significantly.
• Collect customer information – Apart from customer engagement, bots collect basic details like name, email, etc. for future requirements. 
• Human support for complex queries – When the queries are technical and complex, bots can transfer it to the right team, avoiding redirections. 

For example, Funds tiger launches chatbot for loan purposes.

Protips to deliver a hybrid customer experience:

• You can automate your repetitive queries with chatbots so that customers receive instant answers in real-time. 
• If the query is uncommon, bots will not able to understand and will direct it to the right team for effective support. 

4. Live chat increases team productivity

Live chat benefits are so many that they can greatly impact your business. It allows instant connection with the customers and hassle-free resolution with live engagement tools. Automating the tasks reduces the manual intervention and extra hours gained can be used to provide better customer service to boost the customer experience.

• Tasks automation – If your team spends 4 hours every day on the same tasks – automating the tasks will save 200 hours exactly. The hours gained through automation can be utilized for improving customer experience.
• Use advanced analytics – Live chat allows tracking, viewing, and monitoring the agents and team performance. Using live engagement tools makes conversations interactive and effective. 

Employing such strategies helps to boost team productivity which will influence customer experience.

Protips:

• Instant response to customer queries by your support team means higher satisfaction and better live chat customer experience.
• With a live chat and bot, your team can take care of the complex queries and the chatbot can manage routine tasks.

5. Live chat delivers real-time customer engagement

Customer Think says customer satisfaction ratings for live chat are often higher than all other support channels, likely because of the speed and conversational nature, with chat being the preferred support channel by millennials.

Live chat software helps to communicate instantly without letting the customer wait for a long time. The chat conversations can be made interactive by using face-to-face video chat and co-browsing for a better live chat customer experience.

Co-browsing solution helps customer service agents to interact with and guide customers in order to deliver a better customer experience. Find out how interactive customer engagement benefits the customers: 

• Combining live chat with co-browsing and video chat helps resolution of the query in an interactive and meaningful manner. 
• It reduces the total number of touchpoints to get an accurate solution.
• Live chat customer experience develops trust and loyalty with personalized chats.

Tips to boost live chat customer satisfaction: 

• You can make the chat conversations interactive, reduces the number of touchpoints, and delivers a better customer experience (CX).
• By using customer engagement tools, you can deliver faster and more effective solutions in real-time that will make your conversations meaningful and enhance satisfaction levels.

6. Humanize your live chat customer experience

Do you remember how many times you reached out to a company’s help desk number and all you got was an annoying robotized voice repeating the instructions?

Live chat is one of the best website chat app tools that can humanize your customer support. With live chat, you are free from such an annoying robotic experience and you get connected with a human agent for personalized support.

Precisely, this is one of the crucial reasons why 92% of clients feel satisfied while using live chat for customer engagement. 

So how does live chat bring a human touch to enhance the conversational customer experience?

• Live chat is conversational – The online chat software empowers agents to have interactive conversations interactive by using video chat and co-browsing solutions. The face-to-face interaction allows quick error identification and provides effective resolution in the first contact.

• Live chat has a personalized touch – With the chat tool, you can personalize conversations, greetings, and visitors’ information building trust in customers.

Making conversations personalized and interactive by using visual engagement tools deliver an outstanding customer experience. 

Tips for improving customer engagement with live chat:

• With live chat, you can deliver humanized support for complex queries by using live engagement tools. It enables the delivery of faster support, reduces touchpoints, and boosts satisfaction.
• The live support agents do not follow automated instructions but rather offer effective guidance and suggestions in a friendly way, which is really great!

7. Live chat helps to boost customer satisfaction

Running a business means pleasing your customers, meeting their requirements, and keeping them loyal to your brand. At the same time learning customers’ opinions is equally important to deliver the best customer experience. Feedback help to identify the gaps between customers and businesses.

Customer feedback plays a vital role in many business facets:

• Customer Feedback helps to enhance branding by refining your products & services.
• With customer feedback, you can measure the live chat customer satisfaction level

Live chat is an important channel for customer feedback and gaining more preference because it is the best way to ask customer feedback through rating customer service. Asking customer feedback immediately after a demo or live chat session is the best practice.  

How feedback helps to enhance live chat customer experience?

• Customers feel their contribution has been valued when they see it lead to action and change.
• Acting on customer feedback helps to instill loyalty in existing customers.
• Customers that have a positive experience with your brand can become your best advocate.

Measuring customer satisfaction comes down to collecting customer feedback via different methods (surveys, polls). You can receive customer feedback through email or during a live chat with a rating view after the session ends successfully.

Tips to increase customer satisfaction with live chat:

• You must regularly collect feedback from customers to gain insights about their live chat customer experience.  
• The right time to ask for customer experience feedback is just after the customer completes a transaction or task or the conversation is closed. You can get genuine feedback as the customer has recently used your products or services.
• Use live chat examples from other industries, adopt their best practices, and serve your customers better 

8. Live chat for in-app customer retention

In-app messages boost engagement by 3x! 

Providing in-app support, right inside your web or mobile app, is a great way to drive higher user engagement and product support. If you are a SaaS product, there are high chances that your customers may look for help when they are inside your product.  

So when it comes to delivering great customer experience, quality product support is one of the key factors for a software business that drives its customer retention. There are a few areas where live chat messaging is a key contributor to increasing your customer retention.

Sounds a bit exaggerated? Well, as per the Walker report, “Customer experience will surpass these attributes as a key differentiator by 2023.”

Tips to enhance live chat customer experience:

• Integrate live chat for website inside your SaaS app to provide in-app help desk support. It helps to boost your product stickiness and hence increase your retention rate
• Use in-app messaging to provide users with a solid app onboarding that educates about using core features and hence increases mobile engagement

Final thoughts on live chat for great customer experience

Customer experience (CX) is a critical factor in the success of your business. A business with great CX is better able to satisfy customers and assures they continue to return again in the future. Customer experience must be evaluated through the complete service delivery chain starting from initial customer contact to remote support to on-site technician service, and follow-up. 

To deliver an amazing customer experience, brands must develop best-in-class processes, create new and unique ways of interacting with customers, and invest in technology to optimize these touchpoints. With live chat, you open gateways for customers to reach you instantly and for customer experience.