Ten Benefits of Live Chat for Customer Service Teams

Article Summary：The advantages of live chat extend beyond simply providing customers with a faster and more convenient way to contact your customer service team.

When questioned about their support channel preferences, customers express a preference for live chat over social media, email, and even phone support. Why? Live chat support is quick, effective, and convenient.

However, the advantages of live chat extend beyond simply providing customers with a faster and more convenient way to contact your customer service team. In addition to enhancing the support experience, live chat can increase agent productivity, help you gain a better understanding of your customers, and influence your product decisions.

Let's examine the top ten benefits of live chat for customer service teams.

1. Live chat improves the customer satisfaction ratings

Live Chat provides real-time support to customers, allowing them to receive immediate assistance with their inquiries or issues. This can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction ratings, as customers appreciate the convenience and responsiveness of live chat support.

2. Live chat is beneficial for customer acquisition and onboarding.

Engaging in live chat is an excellent method to interact with potential and new customers, providing them with the assurance necessary to utilize your product or make purchases on your website. Forrester reports that individuals who engage in chat are 2.8 times more inclined to convert compared to those who do not.

Being accessible to offer assistance fosters trust, even if customers do not require immediate conversation.

3. Live chat allows your agents to establish rapport with customers.

In a continuing conversation, agents can gauge a customer’s tone and sentiment and adapt their approach to suit the situation optimally. By reflecting style or modifying formality to align with a customer’s, agents can swiftly foster rapport and establish a warm, supportive relationship.

Messaging platforms also provide a more genuine means to display your agents’ personalities than conventional channels.

4. Live chat reduces repetition for your customers

Nobody wants to repeatedly explain their issue. In fact, 72% of customers anticipate that an agent knows their details, such as support history and product information, without having to ask for them.

With high-quality live chat customer service software, agents can view the customer’s message while also accessing other relevant details, such as the customer’s current screen and notes from prior interactions with customer support.

In a chat session, certain tools even enable an agent to share a screen with the customer or effortlessly send links and screenshots to assist them in understanding directions clearly.

5. Live chat enhances the productivity of your customer service team

Live chat also aids in enhancing the efficiency of your customer service representatives. While an individual can only handle one phone call or respond to a single email at a time, with chat, they can manage several simultaneously.

For more complex issues that require research and reporting, they might prefer to focus on one or two, but when dealing with the chat queue filled with quick and straightforward queries, handling five at a time is feasible with some practice.

As the features and chat management differ for each platform, it’s important to select the software that aligns best with your workflows and team. Even better, seek out customer service software that can manage your chats, emails, and other support channels all within one tool, enabling agents to concentrate in one place and accomplish the tasks efficiently.

6. Live chat lets you provide 24/7 support

By carefully scheduling, you can make live chat support available 24/7 if it benefits your business or at any other preferred hours.

Expanding your instant availability throughout the day ensures that your customers’ questions are addressed promptly. Even if you can’t have chat staffed at all times, self-service support options such as a comprehensive knowledge base about your product are accessible at any time.

When chat isn’t available, ensure it’s quick and easy for customers to access your support documentation. Often, people are willing to help themselves but struggle to locate the information they need.

By integrating your knowledge base and chat, customers will feel supported regardless of the time they require assistance.

7. Live chat increases customer engagement

When live chat is easily accessible, you will probably notice more interactions. Some of this may be from customers switching to chat instead of email or phone support, but some of the increase will come from people who discovered chat as a way to get help instead of giving up on your product entirely.

With increased customer engagement comes an opportunity to make a positive impression and give customers a reason to stay. To enhance the welcoming atmosphere, configure your chat tool to show agent names and photos (if possible), and use a conversational chat style.

8. Live chat can improve service team collaboration and knowledge sharing

Live chat allows service team members to easily communicate with each other, share insights, and collaborate on solving customer issues in real-time. This can lead to a more efficient and cohesive team, as well as a more seamless customer experience.

Additionally, live chat transcripts can serve as a valuable knowledge base for the team, allowing them to refer back to previous conversations and solutions when similar issues arise.

With chat transcripts and internal communication tools, teams can easily collaborate on resolving customer issues and share best practices for delivering exceptional customer service.

9. Live chat can give you an edge over your competition

If your competitors do not offer live chat (or provide low-quality chat support), that gives you space to do it right and earn their business.

Think about this: if you were a customer in a hurry trying to decide between two products, would you pick up the phone and call support to get your questions answered, or would you be more tempted by the company that was readily available on their website?

Most people are more likely to ask questions over chat than they are willing to make a phone call. In fact, more than half of consumers prefer chat over phone support.

10. Live chat data informs product decisions

One great advantage of providing support through chat is the ability to gather a wealth of data. Depending on your live chat software, you can store, organize, and tag chats for later review.

By investing time upfront to categorize and review chats, you can build a valuable data repository that benefits your support team, as well as your product and marketing teams.

To start off, create a set of tags that all agents will use, and have them tag their chats accordingly. Consider tagging for things like feature requests and bugs, as well as by question type or topic to identify any recurring issues.

By tagging according to type, you will be able to identify areas in your product that may need updates or require additional support documentation to assist your customers.

Achieving support success with live chat

Customers today are increasingly at ease with live chat technology. It's not just their preference; they also anticipate it. In addition to enhancing the customer experience, the capacity to boost agent productivity, along with the data you'll gather, will drive greater success when incorporating live chat into your customer support strategy.

Udesk’s live chat covers a wide range of channels, including Web Pages, Apps, Tiktok, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and more. If you’re operating an Ecommerce store, it can also access Amazon, Shopify, Walmart and DTC, etc. It is available on desktop, iOS, and Android.

Not only across omnichannels, Udesk’s live chat also provide rich text transmission such as pictures, voice, video, emojis, and files, making a convenient conversation in multiple modes.

When users enter the chat interface, they will receive recommended questions based on their source and browsing history to help them address issues independently.

If the problem cannot be resolved and requires human agent intervention, live chat will assign the most suitable representative based on availability and user profile. At the same time, customer browsing history, inquiries about product orders, and past service records will be synchronized to the agent’s chat interface, making it easier for human representatives to understand customer information and intentions accurately.

Using AI technology, live chat can even recognize customer emotions, provide question-and-answer support using embedded knowledge bases, and monitor and alert conversations in real time for quality control, thus contributing to a comprehensive enhancement of customer service.

》》Take our Live Chat for a spin—for free—to see how it can work for your business.

The article is original by Udesk, and when reprinted, the source must be indicated：https://www.udeskglobal.com/blog/ten-benefits-of-live-chat-for-customer-service-teams.html