Immediate, personable, and effective – these are the hallmarks of a great live chat experience.
As a business owner, live chat support offers a tremendous opportunity for you to engage directly and personally with your customers. Done well, you can even turn first time customers into loyal fans.
The casual, conversational style of live chat converts visitors into customers because just like an actual sales assistant in a physical store, a well-trained live chat team handles questions on products, solves problems, and gently guides a customer along their journey. For proof, four years, we ran the numbers and we generated 27% of our leads from live chat.
So, how do you go the extra mile to wow your customers?
We asked Eugenia Chuprina, head of support at Reply how she built one of the best live chat teams we’ve ever encountered. The quotes below reference this interview.
Looking for more tips and tricks? Check out all of our support leadership interviews, with proven operators from Zendesk, 99designs, Basecamp and Hootsuite.
Engineer Custom Solutions for Your Live Chat Team
Eugenia set up custom solutions for her support team to use when customers hit known issues with the product. In addition to solving this issue quickly for each customer, that provides an ‘over and above’ feeling.
Sometimes someone will want to upload a [large] file that’s too big to upload directly. For a variety of reasons, we haven’t offered that solution for everyone by default, so if someone needs this, my team can work directly with our engineering team to accomplish that task.
Taking a step like this conveys that you care about your customer by taking the time to create a genuine solution to a specific problem while using your product.
Roster Your Chat Team for 2 Minute Median Response Times
When customers approach support, it usually means that they are confused, frustrated, or need more clarification. Live chat provides the value of an instant reply to any inquiry so that customers can move forward.
“Customers love that we are fast. Our median response time is less than two minutes. That includes a response in the message, not just ‘Hi’. I believe that with such a high-paced life-style that we live in nowadays, everyone deserves a fast solution,” says Eugenia.
Nothing is more crucial than prompt solutions that are delivered in a way that truly helps a customer. And even during busy periods, a simple message of an approximate waiting time a customer needs helps manage their expectations.
Eugenia adds, “We never neglect a chat. We always tell someone how long it will take to get back to them.”
You Can Over-Communicate on Live Chat too (in fact it’s easier)
Former Dell CIO Jerry Gregoire once said, “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.”
Providing advice and support in solving problems for customers is central to a successful live chat experience, as such, representatives need to be empowered to offer real solutions and go the extra mile instead of reading from a script.
Eugenia adds, “Every time we compose an answer, we need to provide as much information as we can. We want to show that we understand that they’re busy and they need straight forward answers. We want to make their life a little bit easier with every word we type.”
“Sometimes we’ll send a video rather than a long response. Where appropriate, we try to combine all types of communication in a message - video, image, text. Sometimes people want long descriptions with screenshots, sometimes they’d prefer a visual explanation, such as a video recording. We do a bit of everything in every conversation.”
Live chat has risen over the years as a consumer’s choice of a support channel with 41% of votes and gaining 85% of customer satisfaction, just behind phone support at 91%. During these uncertain times, live chat channels offer a source of instant rapport for customers, and those with live channels are solving 32% more tickets.
Even as adaptable companies are rolling out new channels or scaling existing ones to align with customer needs, live chat remains one of the fastest growing support channels. By engineering an exceptional live chat experience at the management level, you can wow your customers exactly where they need it most.
Looking to build a chat team of your own? Check out live chat support by Influx.
