Live chat is quickly becoming an essential tool for both customer service and CX teams, providing the valuable support that customers require, complimenting your overall offering and making agents’ jobs easier. This article explores how live chat for your website works, what to look for in an effective vendor as well as the live chat implementation process.
Live chat is an important part of the customer service toolkit and is utilised by a multitude of businesses. With 67% of companies in the B2C sector and 66% in the B2B sector using live chat for customer support, the adoption of this key contact channel is expected to further skyrocket, as the market’s value is projected to reach $997 million by 2023, growing at a 7.5 CADGR.
Live chat facilitates two-way communications between your customers and agents, acting as a digital portal to which customers receive support, information and answers to their queries. Unlike self-service channels like chatbots or self-service FAQs that rely on AI, live chat utilises human intelligence to answer queries, making it the perfect solution for dealing with complicated non-routine questions.
Live chat is particularly popular within customer service because it’s versatile and low-cost to run in comparison to other agent-assisted channels such as telephony that doesn’t enable multiple queries to be solved simultaneously. Live chat for your website also offers the following benefits:
For more on how live chat can benefit your customer service operations, click here
Live chat earns its place as a key player in the online customer service offering by supporting other contact channels to ensure FCR whilst presenting itself at opportune moments to boost CSAT and revenue generation.
When the AI that powers your self-service channels such as an FAQ widget or chatbot cannot handle a non-routine question, the customer is automatically escalated to live chat where an agent can deal with the complicated issue. This is facilitated through seamless integration, all taking place in the same window for optimal CX and FCR.
Live chat on your website can also be presented to your visitors in specific forms and at specific times. Trigger management settings are configured to trigger live chat when certain conditions are met, these might be based on pages visited or duration spent on your website.
When it comes to live chat for your website, the selection process might seem monotonous, but choosing an effective vendor is arguably the most critical part of live chat implementation and should therefore be done with care. It’s good practice to conduct thorough research on multiple vendors to ensure you are delivered exactly what your company needs.
Whilst something might appear to be ‘good value’ at first glance, consider that in the long run, such solutions won’t serve companies and their requirements to scale.
When choosing a live chat vendor, consider these points:
Once a vendor has been selected and the SRS has been agreed, live chat deployment – that’s being fully integrated, branded and up and running – should take a matter of days or weeks, depending on your business requirements and timeline.
The live chat implementation process will differ from company to company depending on its individual needs, but generally follows this structure:
It’s good practice to discuss the implementation process with vendors in advance to manage expectations and make sure that these steps are included.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. To continue reaping the benefits provided by live chat and ensure its constant optimisation, its effectiveness must continuously be measured. This is carried out by the frequent analysis and close monitoring of both performance and knowledge effectiveness metrics.
This group of metrics helps you to determine agent productivity, by providing you with data on each agent and their chat metrics, issues can easily be identified and resolved. These metrics include:
It’s important to study knowledge-related metrics in order to understand if the content and knowledge articles being delivered to your customers are serving them effectively. This set of metrics include:
If you enjoyed this article and would like to know more about live chat for your website, read our guide here. Or, if you’d like any advice on how to set up live chat, please
Get in touch