Offering live chat is a great way to solve issues for new visitors and loyal customers alike. However, it’s not enough to simply have this feature on your website; you also need to manage it effectively to get the best results.
The following tips will work wonders in terms of live chat effectiveness, so stick with us as we talk you through the points to keep in mind.
Keep it light
The tone of a live chat should be informal, friendly and approachable, especially if this aligns with the tone of your brand.
Avoid using complex terminology, long sentences and official-sounding language. Instead treat the interaction like a face-to-face conversation with customers, albeit in a digital form.
This is where having well trained support agents is essential. You also need to have clear policies and best practices in place for determining the tone that’s appropriate in live chat scenarios. The less room for ambiguity, the better.
Ask for feedback
Concluding a live chat session with a request for feedback on the experience is sensible. It means you can gauge what you’re doing right, where you’re making missteps, and what you can improve in the future.
You can conduct separate surveys for this, but keeping feedback within the live chat context is better, and more likely to generate responses.
Use previous interactions to prompt future engagement
Logging which customers have used live chat before, and recording what went on in a given session, lets you use this info in future.
You’ll need to stick to data privacy laws when doing this, but the potential to personalize subsequent chats is worth the effort.
Use a system that lets you share rich media, e.g. Google Business Messaging
With Google Business Messaging you get the benefit of being able to add value to live chat support by sharing rich media content directly.
So rather than having to redirect customers to a separate portal to access images, videos or anything else that might help them, you can add this in the chat window itself for added convenience. This also lessens the likelihood that they’ll terminate the conversation before the issue is resolved.
Take things one step at a time
While support agents might need a number of pieces of information from customers, it’s not helpful to request these in a single message right at the start of the conversation.
Instead, deal with this in a segmented way, starting with basic info like their name, and building from there naturally. That way, you won’t find that customers are overwhelmed by a deluge of requests which need answers.
Reflect the customer’s habits back at them
Customers will feel more connected with live chat support team members if they can see some of themselves mirrored in the interaction.
This applies not only to use of certain types of language, but also of emojis, in the case that your live chat platform of choice supports them.
Make sure customers know that live chat is available
Last but not least, be sure to shout about your live chat feature on your site. If you don’t, you might find that people are less willing to use it, and will instead turn to other means of getting in touch, such as email.
Lots of sites have a live chat function that launches automatically when visitors arrive, which is one option. You could also make it an active choice to initiate, but mention that it allows customers to get an instant response to queries, rather than waiting on a reply to an email.