Live chat is an effective customer service messaging channel used by businesses to communicate with prospects and existing customers on their website.
This type of support channel provides your site visitors with immediate support and answers their queries in real-time.
By responding quickly, you will be able to increase overall customer satisfaction rates.
A study by Comm100 found that 82% of consumers were satisfied after a live chat experience, compared to just 44% of phone users.
In addition to that, you will be able to generate leads, engage customers, and nurture long-term relationships – all in one place.
If you’re ready to integrate live chat to your site, read on to discover 5 key steps to successful live chat implementation.
1. Determine the Types of Issues to Solve via Live Chat
Your first step to successful implementation is to single out the various types of issues that your business can solve through live chat.
Each business is unique and has its own way of responding to customer queries. Take the time to list out as many different kinds of queries as you can as it is likely that you will receive a wide variety of inquiries through your live chat.
Include both standard queries that your customer service staff will be able to answer as well as pre- and post-sales issues that can be responded to automatically, and everything in between.
By knowing the exact types of matters that you’ll tend to with your live chat system, you will be able to get great results and provide your customers with an exceptionally good experience.
Furthermore, this will allow you to maintain focus and ensure that your chat staff does not waste their time trying to handle customer issues that they are not equipped to respond to.
Instead, they will be able to dramatically shorten time to first response while creating thoughtful and personalised interactions that help you build strong, long-term relationships with your customers.
2. Decide Who Will Handle the Chat Conversations
The second component of implementing live chat to your website is to choose the people who will be handling customer chat conversations.
Do you plan to handle all the chats internally, or do you intend to outsource some or all of the work?
If you decide to hire chat staff from your existing employees, then you need to train the people you choose and set them up for success by showing them the most effective ways to use the live chat tool to achieve the desired objectives.
The majority of customer messaging platforms today come with a wide range of features that make the work extremely easy and hassle free for your support reps. But you still need to do your best to pick experienced individuals who will increase the resolution rate and reduce customer wait times.
Alternatively, you can hire a third-party service to handle all your customer chats for you. This comes with the advantage of 24/7 availability in multiple languages.
You also have the possibility of transferring chat leads to your business’s phone line whenever applicable.
3. Create Automated Responses
If there’s a chance that your customer chat staff may not be available at all times to attend to incoming conversations, then it’s a good idea to create automated responses for some of the inquiries that you are likely to get from customers.
Chatbots used to be terrible!
But luckily, things have changed – a lot.
Today, chatbots can be extremely helpful and in tune with the user experience.
Integrating chatbots will allow you to continue serving your customers when your staff is off-line. You can even set your chat up so that you make website sales by giving well-thought-out responses to specific inquiries.
However, in order to do this effectively, you must have a good idea of what questions are commonly asked so you can create automated responses to tend to your users even after your staff has knocked off.
Automated Responses for Fast-growing Teams
If you are a fast-growing team, you may also consider automating certain responses or implementing chatbots as a way of scaling teams that receive huge volumes of chats.
You can train a chatbot within minutes to initiate conversations, handle simple interactions, answer intent-based queries, and trigger messages based on user activity.
To do this, simply identify repetitive processes and then automate them using chatbots. You can also set it up so that your chatbots recognise the different moments when it’s necessary to transfer to an agent.
4. Craft Compelling Messaging
Your next step is to create a compelling messaging plan that is aimed at converting your visitors. In this regard, live chat can become an invaluable tool for your sales and marketing teams.
By crafting the right messages, you will be able to build relationships with your visitors over time and encourage them to take various actions, such as trying out new products or services, making a purchase, upgrading the existing plan, signing up for your email list, etc.
Just keep in mind that not every business can sell effectively via live chat. Make sure you understand your industry’s messaging needs before you go about customising your messaging to help you meet your sales objectives.
5. Select Your Key Performance Indicators
The final step is to choose the right KPIs to focus on so you know how well your live chat is performing.
Listed below are some of the most important metrics you should measure and keep track of to ensure your efforts are yielding results.
- ART – Average Resolution Time
- NPS – Net Promoter Score
- CSAT – Customer Satisfaction
- Check to Conversion Rate
You also need to keep your focus on constant improvement. Always be on the lookout for ways to tweak and improve the process to help you meet the demands of your business.
Over time, you will find that you’ll end up with an excellent chat support system that will bring phenomenal results to your business.
Conclusion
The bottom line is, today’s customers expect instant support that is personalised and seamless. If you fail to provide that, you will be pushing your customers into your competitors’ open arms.
Use the information in this article to help you implement live chat so you can provide quality, personalised interactions to generate leads, boost sales, and nurture long-term relationships with your customers.
