Best Practices To Improve Your Live Chat Service & Customer Satisfaction

In our everyday online business environment, more and more companies come up with new ways to provide the best customer support and the best tools to do it.

Now that we have discovered how beneficial a live chat service can be for your online business, we want to give you more value by explaining the steps needed to have best practices with your live chat support system and therefore to improve your customer satisfaction rates.

As with any support channel, there are always working ways and less efficient ways to provide live chat to your customers.

Knowledge Base

In our today’s connected world, people expect access to accurate information from your online business. A knowledge base is basically a self-help information for your clients based on your company. You can find it usually with tons of articles or tips explaining mostly information about a product, service, or any topic. So if you don’t have one, please invest time in implementing it since it is very crucial to help your own customers.

Now if you have one already, remember to keep it up to date. Upgrading is very important to practice in recent days, the ability to upgrade your live chat tools and information regarding your online business should be a top priority. That's why is important to have your KB or "Knowledge Base" as we all know it, always up to date, making sure to avoid any confusion with the information that is being given to your customers. As well, as the policies, procedures, prices, so on. Yet while implementing a new and updated system can help your business improve and save your business some money

Take advantage of your chat settings

The more customers you get the more agents you'd think you probably need, well that is not so true. In fact, there are methods you can use to extensively increase your current employees work and performance. As the saying goes ''work smarter, not harder.''? There's a lot of truth in it. We need to keep in mind that using a Live Chat system offers you a lot of resources to make your agent's work easier.

1. Canned responses

Canned responses or shortcuts are definitely your time savers. If we see it from a general perspective most online businesses have recurrent questions and issues, simply analyze and track down those common issues to take the most out of your agent's time. For instance: price queries, shipping details, type of plans, etc. By creating your personalized canned responses based on your business behavior will shorten your agent responses, therefore, save time.

If you want to know how to create a canned response, please click here.

2. Use Media

With the recent huge population of social media platforms, the way we share information with our friends and family has been updated. Therefore, the way we interact with our community as well. We know how often we find ourselves sharing pictures about our daily life on Facebook or things like that, so using media, like images, links, videos, etc. Can be of great help when trying to explain something to your customers.

3. Track Information

Canned responses or shortcuts are definitely your time savers. If we see it from a general perspective most online businesses have recurrent questions and issues, simply analyze and track down those common issues to take the most out of your agent's time. For instance: price queries, shipping details, type of plans, etc. By creating your personalized canned responses based on your business behavior will shorten your agent responses, therefore, save time.

If you want to know how to create a canned response, please click here.

4. Survey

When we talk about a survey, we think about a general description related to something in specific. Perhaps, a very elaborated description of your problem when you try to contact a support service for help. A survey works likewise, with some detail-oriented key questions we can create the possibility to direct customers to where the problem or solution can be fixed, for that reason, using pre-chat survey questions offers the advantage of knowing what the problem is before your customer starts typing. This way your agents can be more prepared from the beginning.

5. Optimize your chat

Consider where, when and for what visitors your chat will be available. This is very important since it can affect the experience of your customer when visiting your online business. So it is very important you study this before making a decision of setting rules in order to enhance your customer experience.

You can decide to go proactive, instantly popping up messages on your visitor's screen asking if they need any help. However, remem

ber to be discreet, we must avoid falling into the mistake of harassing a visitor and causing them to leave with no interests about our service.

6. Chat Appearance

There’s not much to say when it comes to what your chat window should be like. However, the reason why I decided to point out this topic, is because it is important to understand the type of business you’re working with, so study your niche thoroughly before choosing a chat theme and understand that your chat windows need to work together with what your website represents. Remember simple, sometimes can be enough. So if you’re part of a very delicate business, go easy with your chat window appearance.

If you want to know how you can modify the appearance of your chat window, please click here.

Active Writing

From active listening to active writing-reading, let’s be honest, people love customer support who can be caring and trustworthy for them. Make sure your agents take ownership for a customer’s issue and use words such as "I will do this...for you" or "don't worry, I can....", to make sure customers feel as they have someone, personally working to resolve their issue.

Routine is something that your agent may confront whether your business is constantly changing or not wherefore an agent can face dull workflow, therefore, passive messages which often lead customers to think that their issue is not important.

So the goal is to show customers empathy and make them feel that they are being treated by humans and not robots. The more active your live chat agents are, the more cared for your sustomers feel.

It’s important to consider also your type of niche, let’s say for instance, that your website is an official real estate business. In this regard, we will need to go formal and use messages showing respect for our customers.

So that’s it for now, I hope you enjoy this article and find these practices very useful.

Make sure to implement them and I’m sure it will allow your online business to improve the workflow as well the live agents performances causing your customers to be happier with the support given.

And finally, don’t forget to have your live chat agents using the best Live Chat service, please click below to get started!