The most important link in any business cycle is the customer. Customers are the lifeblood of any system and it is important to maintain them. The past few years have seen an increase in the dedication of businesses and agencies to their customers in a bid to ensure that they are completely satisfied. One of the many products of that increased dedication is the addition of live chat tools to business websites.
Providing the customer with as much information as possible is of great importance. When this information is not enough, it is equally important to provide a platform where those customers can ask questions and quickly get answers so as to improve their user experience and subsequently, their buying experience.
As good as the prospects of using live chat tools to improve customer experience sounds, most businesses are still not enjoying the advantages of the feature. This is because they are not utilizing the best live chat practices in their customer care functions. Without maintaining a standard of service delivery in the use of live chat in businesses, customer service will be a hit or miss venture. That's why it is important to ensure that the best practices for live chat are incorporated into customer service delivery in the year 2020. Some of these best practices include;
Speedy Response to Customers
Nobody likes to wait endlessly for an answer especially customers who need help in making buying decisions. Even if you don't have the right answer to the customer's question yet, make sure you let them know that you have seen the question and you are looking for the right solution to their problems.
This can be automated through the use of preset responses that are sent automatically. This is arguably the minimum requirement for live chat best practices in 2020.
Regular Status Updates
There are times when you will have to check through a lot of information in order to get the right solution to your customer's issue. When this is the case, one of the live chat best practices is to let the customer know exactly what you are doing to help them. If it involves the customer having to wait, make sure you give them regular status updates so the customer won't feel that the chat has been abandoned or that they have to wait forever.
If you imbibe this in your live chat practices, you can effectively manage your customers' expectations and provide satisfactory service every time.
Collect Information Prior to the Chat
This is an important and effective way to speed up the live chat process and help you get solutions faster. You can incorporate an automated questionnaire into the live chat platform so that the customers can briefly describe their issues before an agent chats them up. This will help avoid unnecessary questions and provide a broad overview of what the customer wants.
Use Friendly and Conversational Tone with the Customers
It helps to let the customers know you're on their side and you can feel what they're going through. You don't want to sound distant or like a robot with droning responses that can break up the flow of the conversation. However, as much as you try to be friendly, a degree of formality has to be used so as to maintain the outlook of your brand. This means that the use of slangs and emojis should be limited as much as possible.
Target Specific Customers with Smart Triggers
To make as many sales as you want on your website, you need to be proactive. Being proactive in this sense means that you target specific user actions on your website with automated messages to inspire confidence or clear a potential customer's doubts.
You can easily incorporate this into your website with live chat tools to reduce cart abandonment problems. This can also be added to pages with high bounce rates on your website, so as soon as a customer lands on that page, an automated message is sent to him in real-time to engage with them and convert the lead. This is one of the smartest live chat practices any business can use in 2020.
Ask for Feedback
Finally, one of the easiest ways to improve your live chat practices is to ask your customers for their feedback. These insightful comments will help you identify what you are doing right and which areas can be improved.
Don't forget that the internet gets smarter and evolves constantly, for your business to stay relevant in the year 2020, these live chat practices tips are going to be valuable. Use them and reap the dividends in 2020.
