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What’s Next for Live Chat?

Live chat is an efficient, personalized way to help customers and strengthen your product’s reputation.

ICMI.com posted an article regarding the up and coming need for live chat in the call center industry and for your business. A summary of that article is below:

In order to keep on trend with multi-channel customer support platforms, and keep customer experiences consistent and positive, companies are investing in live chat software.

What are the benefits of utilizing live chat software?

Providing a superior customer experience includes the goal of diagnosing the problem quickly and solving it even quicker. Live chat software assists companies with achieving such goals, reducing average handle time for the contact center agent and improving efficiency in handling customer inquiries across multiple channels.

Live chat software provides statistics that can assist the agent and the company to improve its practices; statistics that can reported in live chat software include time to response, time spent on chat with customer, post-chat satisfaction surveys and responses and much more.

What are the latest and greatest tech trends in live chat?

  • Chat Satisfaction: Post-chat satisfaction surveys are useful and according to a survey completed by BoldChat, 90% of customers who participated in a live chat during their online experience were satisfied with the quick service.
  • Proactive Chat: Companies that use live chat have taken to the Proactive Chat, where they invite their web visitors into a chat interaction prior to their actually having a question. While some have viewed proactive chat activity to be invasive and interruptive of their shopping experience, others have reportedly said that knowing the live chat was there if they had a question gave them better confidence in the product and potential service capabilities of that retailer.
  • Abandoned Shopping Cart Notification: Agents that are notified of customers who have abandoned their shopping cart can assist that customer in completing their sale. Live chat software will track the customer’s visit and will ping an agent if the shopping cart has been left unattended for a certain period of time. With live chat the agent can walk the customer through the process and help assure the customer that their information is secure and won’t be shared.

Can small companies keep customers happy in real time?

Small companies can utilize live chat, even when they have a small customer service team. Training agents in handling multiple channel customer inquiries can assist them in handling more than one inquiry at a time.

Offering live chat can help small businesses reduce customer support costs, since it takes less time to handle an inquiry through live chat; lower cost per interaction and resolution.

Live Chat is One of Many in a Multi-Channel Customer Experience World

Companies should have a multiple channel strategy in place, with live chat being a quick and reliable method customers can interact with support team members. Live chat should not be a stand-alone method for customer support, but instead one of the many ways companies offer connection with their customers.

 

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