In this customer-centric era, good customer service has become the most important part of the business. Customers expectations are rising and it is very important to fulfill their expectations and to offer top-notch customer service in this competitive world. Customers can easily switch to your competitor if they do not feel valued or satisfied.
Live Chat is the icing on the cake for the customer experience. It has become an essential part of the business. It is the best customer communication platform to offer real-time customer service to customers. Integrating into your website can exponentially improve your entire customer experience. 51% of customers believe that businesses should be available 24/7 and Live Chat is the only way to achieve this both effectively and efficiently. More than 60% of customers reported that they are more likely to buy from a website offering live chat support.
Wells Fargo first introduced the concept of Live Chat back in 2008; but recently it has seen a surge in usage. Most businesses know they need a live chat tool, but many of them unable to find the right tool. Mainly, their confusion lies in understanding which Live Chat features they need.
Below are the 5 best live chat features for skyrocketing your net promoter scores:
1. Programming Initiative – i.e. the Trigger
The trigger immediately draws attention to the Live Chat tool. Most customers use Live Chat only for specific queries, leaving much of the lateral demand going untapped. When a programmed trigger, prepared using extensive research, is integrated with, the interaction begins. Through trigger, the brand can offer various promotions or other messages. It also acts as a channel to push those visitors through the customer experience.
The most important aspect of leveraging triggers is extensive research on customer experience and journey. It’s important to understand the most common queries customers have because they can be used to make a set of commonly-asked questions.
A variety of different options can be chosen to initiate the trigger – greetings, downloading freebies or specific announcements. A separate page can also be set up via a Live Chat custom CTA for communicating pricing and contact details.
2. Offline – Online Integration for Conversation Continuation
Live chat is available 24/7 year-round, but keeping customer representatives stuck behind screens that whole time is not operationally-feasible. Offline-Online Integration can be continuous.
When a customer query is received and a customer representative isn’t available, either of the following can occur:
- The query gets pulled into the representative’s pipeline to be responded to as soon as a representative gets online; or,
- Customer representatives receive text or email notifications, depending upon whether or not the query requires urgent attention.
3. Analytics
Analytical tools are the language of performance marketing and digital brand management. Analytics are used to understand the entire website’s performance. So then why shouldn’t businesses have the option of analyzing the Live Chat tool impact using raw data? Analytics help with microanalysis.
Analytics help with understanding the impact of the live chat, like commonly-asked questions. They also help determine effectiveness by gauging a customer’s time spent on the website. They help with customer profiling by leveraging cookies and help to identify which brand phase the customer is in. A quick way to comprehend the impact of the feature is by ascertaining the Net Promoter Score after query resolution.
4. Customer Profiling
Customer profiling provides a highly-required Profile Management functionality which can be used to add the human touch to personalized messages. A customer profile creation can be of tremendous assistance in micromanaging customer communication. The entire sales process can be streamlined with just one customer profiling feature.
A customer in the initial stages of brand interaction will want more information on the brand, its offerings, and reliability; alternatively, a customer who has been loyal to the brand with many purchases will expect loyalty points or brand rewards. This identification can be done simply using customer profiles and the sales representatives can then increase offerings to increase the impact.
Sales representatives can organize customer query handling between themselves by dividing the management of queries according to the expertise of the sales representatives. Certain representatives might have expertise in pushing the visitor through the sales funnel whereas others might have expertise in closing the deal. Because customer profile creation can help with better customer identification, the sales organizing process becomes easier!
5. AI Tools.
AI is the keyword for technological marketing trends and yes, it will remain the keyword for many years to come. Any tool that promises to completely outsource your Live Chat to an algorithm is overstating its abilities, but having real customer representatives answer every common or mundane query makes the process inefficient. The best way to integrate Live Chat AI is by enabling it to answer the common queries using research acquired for previous customer interactions and then bringing in customer representatives in special cases.
AI is still in its infancy but as Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) evolve, replacing them with customer executives will be easily accomplished. ML and NLP can still be leveraged to tag certain types of questions and provide solutions. As queries increase, the model learns from the responses provided by the customer representatives. For now, customer representatives can still overlook the interaction between the AI model and the customer to step in wherever necessary.
Conclusion
To summarize, these Live Chat features can help with the personalization of messages and increasing the entire communication system’s efficiency. As AI evolves, it will become a central piece of the entire strategy; therefore, the data should be gathered now. These tools go above and beyond the basic chat to enhance the customer experience throughout her journey.
