5 Steps to Elevate the Customer Experience through Live Chat
The live chat feature has been around for quite some time now. But only recently companies have started to witness its influence on the website conversion rates. An eMarketer paper stated that live chat is directly responsible for 38% of online purchases, and 62% of customers who used the feature admitted they will most likely buy from the same business who provided the feature.
What is the reason behind the big effect live chat poses on conversion rates? It is widely acknowledged that using live chat for an online purchase is the only way to facilitate the best human interaction. In other words, customers need to talk to an agent who is capable of understanding their concerns genuinely throughout the conversation phase.
In this blog post, we are going to discuss the steps live chat agents must acquire in their job to encourage a powerful, relevant and highly reliable customer experience.
1. Offer a transcript to the customers
When customers communicate with live chat agents, they tend to select and store the most critical information in their records that can prove useful for future conversations and transactions. The concern is that most visitors do not keep close checks on each conversation, so it is highly likely this information can get lost or mixed up. To counter the issue, the agent should make a habit of sending a transcript of each conversation to the customer for their ease and convenience.
2. Use canned messages
Customers should be greeted professionally and politely whenever they enter a live chat conversation. But easier said than done, it takes quite some time to get used to send such standard messages without any hassle. This is where automated canned messages can come for your rescue!
Using vigilantly devised standardized canned messages and automating selected components of your live chat is a great tool for an engaging and problem-solving conversation. However, use canned messages on case-to-case and judgmental basis, as excessive use easily make customers perceive they are talking to a machine rather than a real human. You do not want to lose that personalized and emotional connection with your customer!
The point is to acquire an online chat software for website and create a set of standard canned messages and provide relevant trainings to your agents in order to use them in an appropriate manner.
3. Conduct a pre-chat survey
Before starting the live chat conversation, customers should be encouraged to fill in a pre-chat survey with preliminary information. The point of acquiring information beforehand is to set the tone of the chat. For instance, the customer’s name and a brief description regarding their reason to visit your website would do well. After studying the pre-chat survey, the agent is now ready to start the conversation and answer customers’ needs accordingly.
The pre-chat information also helps the agent to redirect the chat to personnel who is more qualified in the concern stated, just in case the problem lies outside the scope of your job knowledge. However, do see that the pre-chat form shouldn’t contain too many questions, just the foremost information that is truly required to answer a customer’s problem in a fluent and diplomatic manner.
4. Develop cross-department cooperation
Live chat agents should consider the functionality of the in-house support and sales team in order to clearly understand all the product lines of the company. The in-depth information helps the agents in dealing with the customers from a plethora of perspectives either as call support personnel, salespeople, or a live chat expert. Furthermore, chat experts with a thorough knowledge of all the products and processes of a business are able to avail the upsell and cross-sell opportunities without any effort.
The best workaround to turn your chat agents into genuine know-it-alls of the company is to undergo them through the same preliminary training programs as designed for the sales personnel.
