6 Reasons Why Live Chat is a Must-Have for Customer Service in 2021

Last Updated: April 6, 2021

Customer Service begins where the customer remembers your brand and ends where your customers forget it. 

Time and again, live chat has proven to be the best channel for serving your customers and building great relationships. According to Forrester, consumers who use live chat have 2.8 times more conversion rate than those who don’t.

Live Chat for Customer Service in 2021

The year 2020 has been unpredictable. With the advent of Covid-19, businesses and individuals are switching to remote work and virtually serving customers. Sectors like Retail, FMCG, and Education have moved their operations to an online setup. Ecommerce stores are on a rise.

In such a scenario, real-time remote customer service is the need of the hour. What could be a better option than live chat for real-time interaction with customers? 

Live chat support has a 73% customer satisfaction rate as a way for customers to interact with businesses.

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Gone are the days when your customers waited for long hours to get replies via email or phone call. Live Chat addresses their urgency and provides proactive rather than reactive support.

This post explains the latest developments on live chat and how it fits the customer service bandwagon:

Respond in seconds

In a study conducted by Econsultancy, it was found that out of all the live chat users, 79% said they love live chat because they get their questions answered quickly. Faster response time and real-time chat conversations are the USP of live chat.

How is it fast? Live chat features like canned responses, shortcodes, transfer chat, screen sharing via integrations, make it fast and handy. Live chat also lets agents and customers multitask while on a chat, unlike on phone support. 

Provide a Strong Service Experience on Mobile

It’s no secret that we spend a considerable amount of time on our phones. Customer support is also embracing this, and hence there is a need for live chat mobile apps to support customers on the go. Live Chat apps help your agents to chat with customers while they are away from their desks.

A good mobile app will have basic to advanced features like real-time monitoring, canned responses, chat history and transcripts, transfer chats, reporting, and dashboards. 

If you are running an app-only business, the In-app Chat SDK is a great option to serve customers without having to go elsewhere to ask a question.

Handle Huge Volumes of Requests via Chatbots 

Your support agents are humans, and humans need to rest. But providing the best customer service requires a 24/7 presence. Chatbots come to aid in such scenarios. Your chat widget can represent a real agent or a chatbot.

Chatbots are software programs created to automatically engage users and handle huge volumes of FAQs on behalf of your team. Chatbots are also intelligent to route the chat to a real human when they don’t have an answer.

In the situation of crises such as Covid-19, digital channels can be activated in a matter of days, can scale quickly by using AI Chatbots, and easily be deployed to your newly-remote agent workforce. Bots can help in cutting down costs, offer self-service, and provide front line support so your agents can focus on the complex queries.

Support Customers in Their Language

What’s better than hiring support agents that are proficient in regional languages? It’s real-time live chat translation. Customers feel at ease and are more likely to communicate with your chat agents when they know that you offer native language support. 

The live translation feature helps in automatically detecting the language of your customer and translates those messages to the language that the agent understands and vice-versa. The chat transcripts are also available to the agents in the translated language.

Be where your customers are

When was the last time you logged in to Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter? I bet you are online on social media, as you read through this article. Having live chat on your website is great, but live chat integration with messenger apps will allow you to start a conversation with new customers without requiring them to visit your site.

Instant help is the best help. Don’t let your customers take any extra pain to contact you. With various support channels integrated to live chat, your agents can handle all chats within a single dashboard. Your customers can chat in their favourite apps to get support, thus providing an omnichannel experience.

Ensure Brand Loyalty

Customer loyalty is one of the essential ingredients for effective business performance. Live chat helps your customer service team to chat directly with customers and leave a lasting impression by addressing their queries real quick.

During difficult times it’s important for businesses to fulfill the emotional needs of their customers and employees. This will ensure customer stickiness and word of mouth marketing for your brand. Evaluating customer feedback and improving your service by showcasing your brand values go a long way in scaling your business.

The Last word

Your support team plays a significant role in providing an exceptional and on-point customer experience. They need to be trained and should follow live chat etiquettes to be of help at the right place and right time. Looking for a chat solution for your team? Choose HappyFox Live chat software to win the customer service game in 2021.