How to Improve the Live Chat Experience in 2022

Live chat is now the most popular customer service channel, and it’s not hard to see why. According to Invesp, live chat is by far the most satisfactory way to communicate with a company, with customer satisfaction at 73% for live chat compared to 51% for email, and 44% for phone. 

Of course, to see all the benefits of live chat, you need a robust live chat solution that offers a wealth of tools. In 2022, live chat expectations have increased, and providing the best possible customer experience (CX) now means allowing customers to connect how and when they want. 

Here are the key ways that you can improve your live chat experience in 2022, and the tools that can help you on your journey towards digital CX excellence.

1. Offer more personalized and genuine support 

While personalized CX can take on many forms, one thing that everyone agrees on is the value of personalization: 

• A study by EverString and Ascend2 showed that 69% of companies rated personalizing the customer experience as their top priority
• Research by Segment found that 71% of consumers express some level of frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal
• Epsilon and GBH Insights found that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences. 

While there is an obvious need to provide personalized support, not all live chat software offer the same personalization capabilities. At the center of this, and key to empowering your agents to provide customized support, is an omnichannel platform.  

Digital omnichannel platforms connect every key digital channel together, whether that be live chat, email, social media, or even SMS. This means that when a customer reaches out on any channel, all of their previous conversation history is easily viewable to the agent, no matter what channel they are on. The agent can also see the customers’ profile with information such as purchasing history, geographical location, website behavior, and so much more. The agent can then use this information to inform their responses and so provide highly personalized and helpful support. 

With an omnichannel platform, you can also set up routing rules that will automatically direct customer queries to specific teams or even agents. Typical chat routing scenarios include: 

• Customers from different geographic regions should be served by the resellers, partners or teams responsible for those regions
• VIPs may be served by a senior team while non-VIPs may be received by lower-level teams
• Customers are assigned to dedicated account managers and are served by those account managers who know them well. 

2. Provide 24/7 support 

Along with personalized service comes the expectation of 24/7 support. Customers are no longer content to wait for “business hours” to connect. Living in a world of instant gratification, consumers expect around-the-clock support. 90% of consumers rate an immediate response as “important or very important” when they have a customer service question.

24/7 support may seem out of reach for even large organizations, but chatbots are the cost-effective answer. A chatbot can handle an unlimited number of inquiries with no response delay, at any time of the day. The best of these chatbots now integrate AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), meaning that you can maintain outstanding CX while introducing unmatched speed and convenience. 

Chatbot ROI Calculator: Reduce support costs and scale your operations with AI Chatbots 

3. Speak to your customers in their language 

To achieve CX excellence, you have to connect with customers on their terms, not yours. While this means offering a variety of channels, there’s a way to truly stand out – allowing your customers to speak in their preferred language. 

Even for customers in an organization’s traditional market, support for multiple languages can be a major selling point. Whether a customer is a new immigrant or simply prefers communicating in another language, support for other languages is a significant way to differentiate service from competitors. With the need to staff for skills like multilingualism, traditional phone support has kept the ability to support multiple languages out of reach for most organizations. 

With support for auto chat translation, live chat now allows customers to reach out using any language, and for agents to respond using the same language. Organizations can now easily target international visitors by establishing foreign-language websites and providing any necessary support via live chat. 

4. Offer alternative ways to resolve their problem  

With customer needs now more diverse than ever, your live chat platform should provide alternative ways to connect with customers to solve their problems. One of these essential live chat technologies in a support or sales environment is screen sharing. This feature allows agents to instantly view the visitor’s web browser and vice versa.

With screen sharing set up, agents can guide customers efficiently to the correct information and troubleshoot issues efficiently and smoothly.

Since privacy is always imperative in customer communications, screen sharing solutions should be built to mask details such as credit card information from agents. Be sure to look out for live chat software that has in-built screen sharing. This means no downloads are needed from your customer and it can be initiated with a single screen sharing request sent from an agent, creating a far smoother experience.

Another important feature that live chat provides is audio and video chat. Like screen sharing, this feature can be implemented without downloads or plugins, and it allows your customers to speak to an agent in real-time for a quick resolution, or to add a touch of personalization. Sales representatives can also provide visual demonstrations of products, and for customers deaf or hard of hearing, video chat can be an excellent accessibility tool.

 Wrap Up 

To learn more about the features that can transform your live chat in 2022, and to see these features in action, schedule a demo of Comm100 Live Chat.