Nowadays, customers want to get support as soon as they get problems. As a result, you need to deliver real-time support channels to quickly reach out to customers. That’s when a live chat comes in handy. It’s similar to phone support, but it is a lot quicker and you don’t have to wait for on-hold music.
However, a responsive live chat tool isn’t enough to leverage customer service. Therefore, we have listed 5 eCommerce live chat best practices to help your agents provide a consistent experience and make the best decisions to satisfy customers. Let’s dive in immediately.
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Place live chat where visitors expect to see it
You should provide live chat across your site’s pages to support customers whenever they need it. It can also bring customers a more convenient experience if they can easily reach out to your support team. On the other hand, according to some studies, to deliver the best live chat experience, it should be displayed at the bottom corner of the customer screen. Your live chat should be easily accessible and displayed with a small icon that only expands when it’s clicked.
However, it is up to you whether to offer live chat on more important pages such as landing pages, during the important processes in the customer journey such as check-out, or on customers’ screens who have spent a lot of time on your sites without adding anything to their carts.
Talk to customers like a real person
The whole point of live chat is to deliver fast, human-assisted help to solve customers’ issues and improve the shopping experience. Of course, you still can provide automated responses and don’t need to have a real person on the other side at all times, but being human is the best way to support customers.
To show your customer that they are getting support from a real person, you can follow these ideas
- Set an avatar for your agent
Set a real person’s avatar to make customers know there is a real human chatting with them. You can also add your name to the conversation to deliver humanized interaction immediately.
- Provide a more personalized experience.
On the first time customers contact, your agent should ask some specific questions such as “What is your name”,… to gather their information and store it for future reference. Until the next time customer reaches out, your agent has already had their information so that they can start the conversation more personalized.
- Listen carefully and empathize with their issues.
Always ask if customers want any more information before closing the conversation. By doing so, customers will see the willingness to be of service, and also you should let the customer decide when the conversations are over. Moreover, Customer service representatives should listen carefully and repeat the problem customer has mentioned. It will make customers will understand that you really care about their issues and that you are trying to resolve them as quickly as possible.
- Match the customer’s tone
Be sure that your voice matches your customer’s tone. Use polite words and be formal, and repeat after them if they have any questions. It will make customers understand that they are heard and truly cared for.
- Provide customers with more information.
Customers will be really loyal to your brand if service agents go above the line to give them more information about products and services. You should encourage your service agents to leave some blogs post or instruction videos about the products or services that they are talking about. This also makes customer engage with your brand more often and drive more traffic to your site.
Lower response times
Making customers wait too long can be a burden to your business and quickly erase the reputation and even how great your services and products are. Although live chat will make customers will not need to wait too long for a reply from service agents, if the agents put customers on long hold for too long, they tend to leave your brand.
Minimizing response time is one of the best ways to improve the customer experience. Representatives need to follow up with your customers with the help of live chat and solve their problems as soon as possible. Besides, they can give customers more detailed information and support to deliver a more personalized service.
Gather data and information from each message
Live chat is the perfect tool to collect customer information. Customer service agents can ask first-time customers about their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and more specific information. The information would be stored in the live chat and appear the next time they engage with your brand. Therefore, customer service reps will not have to ask for customer information again.
There are some metrics that you can use to measure live chat efficiency such as First-time resolution, Average time resolution, etc. This data is not only useful for further measurement and analytics, but also for specific cases or events when customers meet some problems on their journey and need to reach out to customer service.
Top merchants always make the most out of customer data. Therefore, take your time to learn what your data can get you. Sometimes, it can be the difference between a winning and a losing year.
Train your customer service team
The last best practice for your customer service teams is to train them so that they can deliver a consistent experience during the customer’s journey with your brand. The most important factor that makes customers satisfied is how your agents deliver support to customers.
To help agents provide customers with a consistent experience, you should provide customer service agents with both product training and soft skills training. Through product training, customer service agents will have a deep understanding of your products or services, their features, and prices to provide the customers with the most detailed information. Besides, soft skills training will help agents listen actively and show empathize with customers whenever they have a bad experience with your brand.
Ready to get benefit from your live chat?
Live chat is widely used among businesses not only for customer service teams, but also for marketing, sales, and other departments. If you want to use live chat software for your business, the practices mentioned above will help you increase the overall customer experience with your service and your brand.
If you are finding a live chat app to quickly support your customers on the website and social media, NestDesk can even help you do more than what you expect. NestDesk can help turn your exceptional customer service into a powerful sales channel. Leverage your customer service by integrating all sales channels, creating orders on the chat portal, auto assign, macro, and many more cool features to make the customer service workflow faster.
