Live chat support is one of the best ways to improve customer engagement. Properly managed, this feature can give you substantial and lasting increases in conversion rates and overall customer satisfaction. It is up as a customer support asset, up from 8.3% in 2017.
However, there are a lot of mistakes that businesses make with live chat support – errors that can be avoided. You need to do more than just have a live chat available for your customers.
Live chat errors to avoid
Here are the most important things to consider before going live with live chat.
You are not ready to play?
You lose all the benefits of live chat if you ask your end user to move heaven and earth just to talk to you. First, requiring software downloads or huge information captures from your end user before discussing is not the norm of the industry. Your competitors who successfully implement live chat do not do these things – you'd better leave the live chat alone if you put your customers to work just to use it.
First, leave the huge information entered for the cat. If you ask too much, your prospect may disengage even before asking his first question. Get just enough to identify the person in front of you. She will give you the rest during the conversation!
Even worse when you need your prospect to install something on his side. Your user is likely to call to solve a technical problem, and you give him more problems!
Your solution:
It is much easier to get information when you offer value in return. Wait until you engage the client in the chat before starting to ask too many questions. Keep in mind that your client is communicating with you to ask a question, not the opposite!
You have too much automation
The commitment of your customers does not have to be fully customized. There is a place for chatbots, and properly used, your customers will not even know the difference. However, overuse of automation is a temptation that you will have to avoid. These are not sales after all, where automation becomes an integral part of operations.
Surprisingly, most companies do not engage in automation to save money. Many companies believe that customer responses can be controlled if only a few conversation options are offered. While this may work for basic questions, you will eventually come to a deeper level of problems that can not be answered by the boxed answers.
The same applies to the models. Regardless of the number of scripts that a robot offers from a model, the technology is simply not enough to replace a good customer service representative.
Your solution:
Separate simple questions that robots can answer in a separate pile, away from deeper questions that require a human touch. If you have a budget, consider that you do not necessarily need more manpower. You need better customer service representatives with more experience and the ability to think about their feet.
You have representatives of entry-level customer service on call
One of the biggest pet-friendly customers is the lack of available customer support in case of emergency. Although the above tip suggests that you do not need to hire a support overload, you must have a sufficient number of highly trained and well trained customer representatives ready to go. The number of these representatives is not as important as the talent and training they have.
The customer engagement process usually begins when the end user opens a ticket. If this customer encounters a message stating your inability to provide service in a timely manner, you have just lost a customer. More than that, you could have inspired a negative review on Yelp, which will eventually find its way to Google.
Your solution:
Take the time to find the right people to populate your customer service. Before you find this group, do not post 24/7 customer service or live chat as a feature of your business. Make investment in training customer service representatives when you have found the people with the expertise and the required behavior.
Missing the maximum chat time
You should try to operate your live chat 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's where the live chat excels as an option by comparing it to the hotline. If this is not possible, you must choose the hours you cover. There's no need to guess rush hours – there's a lot of data on opening hours that receive the largest number of customer service calls in general. However, rush hours you should be worried or rush hours for your business individually.
Considering the peak times, it's also understand how things like vacations and natural disasters affect rush hour. Your sector may also experience changes in the way customers choose to engage. You have to keep your ears on the street to follow the way your industry is moving.
Your solution:
Gather the data you need to understand the peak hours of your business. Also consider the geographic location of the majority of your customers. Schedule your customer service representatives to handle calls during this time if you can not take a 24/7 schedule. As you continue to collect data, you will be able to predict when the majority of customers will call.
These are the hours of customer service you should announce. Once you set expectations for your customer service hours, you will experience much less disappointment from customers.
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