Reduce business costs with Live Chat

Live chat is a platform that allows employees and customers to “talk” directly with support staff. This connection is often made from a website or other messenger channels. Customers and employees can communicate problems using typed dialog, and agents can provide solutions.

Live chat significantly benefits your business compared to email, phone support, instant messenger services, and other communication platforms. With the right chat system, customers and employees can quickly and effectively find the right person to solve their problems. In addition, the right chat system will connect customers to automated chats (chatbots) to quickly and efficiently resolve issues no matter the time, day or night.

Efficient

Many companies traditionally use phone calls to support their customers and employees. When a customer has a problem or question, they need to call, navigate the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System menus, and wait for an agent to help them with their problem.

Often, the customer selects the wrong option, and the agent needs to transfer the customer to another department or agent. The customer experience is painful. Disconnects, additional wait times, and repeating problems and customer details create delays and frustrations.

The right chat platform will be many times more efficient than Voice Support.

First, a good chat platform will support chat groups to provide specialized support areas. These chat groups will have the skills and training to handle specific customer problems quickly and efficiently (e.g., billing questions, order problems, etc.) When the chat session is initiated, the customer is asked to select the required support type (e.g., “order not received”).

This pre-chat survey qualifies the problem and routes the customer to the right support group. In addition, as part of the pre-chat survey, additional customer information will be requested (e.g., “order number”). These chat parameters are passed to the chat agent and allow efficient handling of issues without requiring the chat agent to request the details.

Second, an efficient chat platform will allow a chat agent to handle multiple chat sessions simultaneously. A chat agent can often take four customer sessions at once. The system should fully support multitasking, and switching between chat sessions for the agent needs to be quick and efficient.

The right chat system will provide instant context to the session and provide cuing to simplify responses to the customer. With targeted chat groups, problem resolution will be more effective. Chat groups should be fully trained to handle their scope of issues, which will provide efficient handling of issues.

The chat platform should support chat transfers and group chat. When a problem requires additional handling by other groups, the chat session can be transferred, or other chat team members can join the session to provide additional support. When transferring a chat, the system should move all the context to the next session. The chat includes all customer details provided, chat history, etc. The customer or employee won’t need to repeat any details upon transfer.

Supervisor reports and reviews will allow the oversight required to ensure problems are being handled efficiently and effectively.

Automated post-support chat surveys should be enabled to receive direct feedback on problem resolution and customer satisfaction. Intelligent surveys should detect dissatisfaction and directly engage customers to resolve lingering issues.

Gateway to Automation

As problem resolution migrates from voice to chat, a new opportunity for automation is created: the automated chatbot. A chatbot is a software program designed to interact with customers and help them resolve issues without human interaction. A quality chat platform will support the development and use of chatbots within the existing framework and will appear seamless to the customer or employee.

Using time and problem-tracking reports, companies can identify everyday time-consuming tasks that are easily automated. An effective chatbot system will quickly and efficiently convert a human chat session to a fully automated bot and integrate that bot with the chat platform.

Driving customers and employees to fully automated solutions provides the ultimate cost-effective and efficient solution. Minimal costs to operate these solutions, which are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.