Having a customer support live chat is a great thing. It can mean that the customers stick around and stay with you for years because their problems are being heard and they are finding solutions.
Making a relationship with your customer is one of the most important things to retain that relationship and earn the trust and loyalty of your customer. That aim should extend to your live chat feature as well. Treat your customer support as a consulting business because you are solving issues and helping your customers.
Here’s one of the main things that should be kept in mind when designing the responses, even the automated ones.
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Be Real and Authentic
This may sound too obvious as a live chat tip for delivering better customer support, but if you’re not mindful, you can quickly come off as distant and robotic.
After all, many people are still getting used to text-based interactions with reps and have a hard time depicting a cheerful tone. We all know that it is very easy to misunderstand the tone of a text message easily, the tone is often lost in interpretation.
The good news is that you can train your agents on what sort of voice and tone to use. For instance, if you are a company that sells geek-themed merchandise, you might want your live chat team to use a more colloquial voice than if you were selling bakery items.
Besides that, you can use advanced chat features, agent names, emoticons, and images so that your live chat support team can start building rapport as soon as the interaction begins. This also makes people more comfortable because they think they are having an interaction with someone they know, this makes the experience more pleasant for them.
It is equally as important for your customers to know you as it is for you to know them, so do whatever you can to be more ‘human’ over live chat. When customers get great customer support, they are bound to come back. They make more of a connection to a business than a product. If you have a good rapport with your customers, then even if something goes wrong, loyal customers will understand and stick by you.
Empower Your Agents
Today’s consumers have busy lives and would rather not spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to get their matters resolved. Hence, it’s crucial for live chat agents to provide solid resolutions during the initial interaction.
If a customer is forced to make multiple attempts to get his/her issue resolved, your customer support team may lose credibility which can impact your reputation and long-term revenue.
Make sure live chat reps have the proper tools to offer first chat resolution. This can be done by providing comprehensive knowledge training to ensure that they’re competent enough to address customers’ pain points.
Another thing you can do is make a knowledge base for quick retrieval of possible solutions. Because some customers prefer self-service, agents may be able to point them towards the knowledge base for possible resolution without additional guidance.
As customers go through the knowledge base content to self-service, agents are free to accept other live chat requests. Agility is what can be achieved through this and it saves time for both the customer and your live chat support team.
Final Thoughts
Your aim should be to make the experience as easy and worthy as possible. When the customer feels like they are making some headway, they won’t mind spending hours, but if they feel like they are not being heard, then even a delay of few minutes can mean losing that particular customer.
