Customers expect immediate results but they also crave the personal touch.  Abbie Heslop of EBI.AI discusses how artificial intelligence (AI) can help to achieve the right balance.

Changing expectations are driving the need for a faster, more personalised and memorable customer experience (CX). Therefore, organisations are looking to implement an innovative mix of channels and technology to make it happen.  Those that come up with the right formula can expect extra sales, greater customer loyalty, better utilisation of frontline staff and reduced costs.

This search for alternative methods of response is one of the reasons why live chat is growing exponentially, quickly overtaking voice calls, social media and email as the preferred method of communication. According to Techjury, 75% of people prefer live chat over any other channel. Statistics tell us that customers choose chat for convenience and shorter wait times, unlike voice calls. Customers also say they are able to better engage with the brand, outline concerns and get immediate outcomes using live chat.  What is more, the average customer satisfaction rating for a live chat service exceeds 87%. What better incentive for organisations wanting to differentiate themselves in a challenging and highly competitive world?

So where does Artificial Intelligence (AI) fit in?  At a time when frontline agents continue to be flooded with queries and customers expect a fast, personalised service, AI offers an opportunity to take customer experience (CX) to a whole new level. Based on machine learning, it has the ability to sift through and analyse unlimited amounts of data in real-time to provide quick, accurate responses.  At the same time, it can respond using natural language to add warmth and empathy to every single customer interaction.

Good for customers, good for agents, good for business
Here are the top 3 ways Artificial Intelligence can enhance human experience:

• Seamless customer interactions – today’s AI solutions are perfect for giving customers choice and for improving the effectiveness of popular communications methods such as live chat.  Whether an organisation offers a bot response or live chat service, AI guarantees that all enquiries are answered concisely, smoothly and in a way that is seamless to the customer.
  For example, AI bots can quickly be trained to answer generic questions such as ‘is my local store open as usual?’ and ‘do you offer a click and collect service?’ meaning they can be added to the front end of a live chat service to save customer and agent time.  For more complex questions, the bot simply hands over to a live agent while simultaneously imparting valuable intelligence such as customer sentiment and previous interactions, so agents have all they need to deliver satisfying conversations every time.  Thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI has many human qualities that bring automation to life.  This means that behind the scenes, the bot is able to capture and save every element of the blended bot/human conversation to provide a complete transcript of the interaction.

• Virtual concierge for agents – with many frontline staff working from home, AI solutions are an agent’s new best friend, offering them their very own virtual concierge or dedicated personal assistant.  Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI tools quickly understand a customer’s initial query then pass this valuable information to the live agent who already knows what the customer is enquiring about.  Agents can even ask their virtual concierges questions while in conversation with a customer to deliver fast, accurate and highly personalised responses.  This boosts agent confidence and performance while humanising the overall customer service experience.

• Remove barriers between man and machine – AI technology has broken down traditional barriers by combining the best of technology and live agents to increase efficiencies while using real customer interactions to elicit emotionally intelligent, human responses.  Artificial Intelligence in all its forms, for example, a virtual assistant sitting on the front of an IVR menu or at the beginning of a live chat box – has the potential to increase the volume of conversations contact centres and customer service organisations can conduct and support around the clock.  This boosts productivity and improves response times while taking immense pressure off organisations with growing contact volumes and shrinking teams that are often restrained by the limitations of a 9-5 Live Chat service.  What is more, thanks to machine-learning, the more AI tools are used, the better they get, making them a valuable and strategic addition to an organisation’s corporate CX and sales strategy.

Good for customers, good for agents and good for business, AI is helping to enhance the human experience and find the right balance between immediate results and personalised customer experience.  For more ideas and information, visit www.ebi.ai

About the Author

Abbie Heslop is a Commercial AI Analyst at EBI.AI.

Established in 2014, EBI.AI is among the most advanced UK labs to create fully managed, Enterprise-grade AI assistants. These assistants help clients to provide their customers with faster and better resolutions to their queries, and liberate front-line customer service agents from the dull, repetitive and mundane.

EBI.AI selects the best AI and cloud services available from IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and others, combined with bespoke AI models to deliver its AI communication platform, called Lobster.

Combined with it over 19 years of experience working with big data, analytics and systems integration it has successfully implemented AI assistants that now handle hundreds of thousands of conversations a year across Transport & Travel, Property, Insurance, Public and Automotive industries.

For more information, please visit www.ebi.ai.

Live chat is a wonderful way to provide customers with quick access to your customer service department 24/7. The good news is, it has never been easier to find and implement a live chat solution that is right for you. 

Here are some of the key benefits of implementing live chat as well as some tips on how to choose the best software for your organization.

5 Benefits of Live Chat

1. It Offers Immediate Solutions

Live chat gives customers the ease and comfort to seek guidance and help right from their home or office. It offers an instantaneous solution rather than emailing and waiting for a response and later be pitched continually for products. Many people do not even like sharing their personal information and may avoid filling out a ticket, which usually requires such information. The on-demand nature of the web will allow you to respond to issues directly and save the time spent fielding email responses.

2. It Provides Convenience to Customers

For potential customers, getting help from a live chat is a confidence booster. According to research, 44% of customers feel that the most important feature a website can offer is live help in the middle of an online purchase. Good software includes visuals and sounds, which allow customers the convenience to move about while waiting for a response. There is also the visitor footprint feature in live chat software that allows customers to avoid having to repeat themselves and the steps they took which led them to live chat. It allows sales rep to see the pages they visited, the time they spent on the page and whether they are a repeat customer or not. This saves time and frustration.

3. It Opens Doors for Sales Opportunities

Most live chat sessions end after solving a customer’s inquiry, however, therein lies the profit booster, which many companies miss. At this point, you can train your customer service reps to let customers know of a sale, promotional offer or other prospect that they may be interested to purchase. The customer is saved of the effort to find out about it themselves and, if lucrative enough, just might opt for it. To gain the most from live chat support, look for software that is compatible with tablets and mobile devices to provide on the go service.

4. You Can Personalize Your Service

While live chat is considered more interactive than email, it is still talking to a machine, rather than a person, to many customers. You can personalize your live chat service by simply providing an icon with the service rep’s name and photo during the chat process. This gives the customer a face to connect to the words typing across his screen, which makes the entire chat process warmer and more personal. bestecommercebuilders.com covers more of the topic here.

5. It Will Give Your Business an Edge

An important reason to consider live chat functionality is that it will set you apart from the competition. Live chat could be the differentiating factor while other things like product and pricing may be similar to that of a competitor.

How to Choose the Best Live Chat Software

If you are considering the addition of live chat to your website, there are a number of software options to choose from today. Before you begin shopping for software for your company, here are some tips that will help you pinpoint the best live chat software for your specific needs.

1. Consider Your Hosting Capabilities

Make sure the live chat software you choose will be compatible with your website. While most software options work well with Windows operations, it may be significantly more challenging to find tools that work equally well with Macs. Consider what can easily be built into your current infrastructure and run without numerous hiccups to frustrate your customers and your service staff.

2. Look for User-Friendliness

Live chat is only effective if it is easy for both your customers and employees to access and operate. Live chat buttons should be prominently displayed on various pages of your website to ensure customers can connect with live help from any location. Some software packages allow the live chat transcript to be emailed to the user after the chat has ended – a valuable service touch for some companies. In addition, some software offers the ability for customers to leave messages via live chat when the service is not currently operating.

3. Decide How Much Help You Need

When shopping for live chat tools, you must determine whether you will man the live chat internally through your own service staff, or whether you want to outsource the service. Companies that are going to man the live chat themselves may want to consider a package that includes mobile access to ensure employees can access the site through various tools, including tablets and smartphones.

4. Examine Flexibility and Adaptation

As your business grows, your live chat may need to grow along with it. Choose software that will allow for the addition of operators later on, so you can continue to appropriately staff your live chat using your original tool. By the same token, you may want a package that allows service employees and customers to chat with employees in other departments, so choose tools that can accommodate this need as well. Tracking and monitoring may also become more important as your business grows, so keep those features in mind as well.

5. Check Out Reviews

As you begin to narrow your choice of live chat options, begin studying a few online reviews to find out what other users are saying about the live chat software. Some review sites provide rankings of software based on numerous features to help you select the packages with the features you need most. Many of these websites may also come with recommendations from software experts, based on the usability and performance of the software, as well as other characteristics.

Live chat is a huge boon to customer service departments today, allowing organizations to provide yet another option for customer contact. Finding the right live chat software can allow you to interact with online customers on a whole new level.

Today, the importance of live chat for a company that provides customer service is beyond dispute.

Live chat is now one of the components of virtually any customer support toolset and used by businesses as one of the active customer communication channels.

The benefits of live chat are obvious. Customers prefer it for speed, convenience, smooth user experience that live chat provides. From year to year, statistics show a growing rate of customer satisfaction with live chat as their channel of communication with businesses – it reaches as high as 92%.

Companies maintaining a customer service department also appreciate the benefits of having a live chat – trust it helps to build with their customers, increased conversions and cost-effectiveness. Indeed, you can only have a phone conversation with one customer at a time, while a skilled agent can hold as many as four or five live chats simultaneously. The performance of the service team may get significantly higher.

At the same time, just installing and configuring live chat may not be enough to reach its maximum performance. In this article, I am going to share some best practices that can help you make the most of the live chat benefits.

How to make live chat benefits work for you

Live chat is already a powerful feature, but introducing some practices both in the chat technical setup and in the communication culture will help it reach maximum performance.

#1 Place the live chat widget strategically

In the majority of cases, the live chat widget is located in the right part of the screen, most often in the bottom-right corner. This is where your visitors’ eyes will look if they are searching for live chat. It would be wise to place your live chat widget there to make it easier for customers to find it.

Many communication tools that include live chat offer flexible configuration options that you can use to set up your live chat to be the most effective. Among other settings, you might find the positioning of the live chat widget where you can choose the most suitable placement.

Another tip is to include the live chat in all pages of your website. This way, the customer will be able to chat with you wherever they are.

#2 Be proactive

In other words, be the first to start the conversation. Customers might need assistance but won’t start the chat for various reasons – they do not see it, they do not believe there is someone on the other side, they are too introverted to start a conversation.

Offer assistance when your analytics reports certain customer behavior – they spend too much time on a page or they abandon their shopping cart, for example. Use specific chat templates for each situation where customers might need assistance.

#3 Remain human

Your customer should feel that they are talking to a human being, not a robot. There are quite a few things you can do to make your chats sound human and personal:

• Set up accounts with real names and photos.
• Use friendly and neutral language with a positive attitude towards the customer and their problem.
• If possible and appropriate, switch to voice calls with or without screen sharing, thus creating a more personal connection with the customer and building trust.

#4 Use saved responses

You can also find them under the name “canned messages”, and they are, indeed, a huge time- and effort-saver. Instead of typing a whole sentence, just use a key tag, and your pre-programmed text will appear in the chat window automatically.

Besides time-saving, canned responses, being prepared and verified in advance, are free from typos or any misleading statements. Using such pre-programmed messages makes your conversation much more professional.

#5 Integrate knowledge base in your live chat

While chatting with the customer, provide relevant links to your knowledge base. By doing this, you are killing two birds with one stone – complement your responses with full information and promote the knowledge base encouraging the customer to use it.

You can either provide links manually while chatting or offer a list of related subjects after the chat is finished.

#6 Offer a chat transcript

Your conversation with the customer can contain important information that they might want to use later. Provide an option to send the chat transcript to their email for further reference.

The best time for this option is upon the completion of the chat. Offer the customer to choose whether they want the transcript or not and include the field for the email address.

#7 Be mobile-friendly

Making your live chat available on mobile, on the one hand, increases your availability and exposure to your target audience and, on the other hand, makes your service more convenient for customers. They can reach out to you wherever they are and you, in your turn, can also start a conversation when they are browsing your website on their smartphones.

Besides, always consider live chat as an active component of your marketing strategy. Mobile marketing is getting bigger, thus, all your customer communication channels should be supported on the mobile platform.

#8 Monitor your live chat performance

Like with any other tool you use, it is never enough to just implement live chat and rest on your laurels. You need to monitor its performance closely to identify any deficiencies early and adjust them quickly.

The most effective way is to collect performance metrics showing how your live chat is doing. There are many of them – the first response time, the time to close, the number of messages per case, the number of requests per agent, etc. All of them describe your live chat situation from different perspectives giving a complete picture of its performance and showing whether it adds to customer success.

The most straightforward metric that you can measure is customer satisfaction. To get that data, simply add the rating feature to your live chat configuration. Right after the chat is closed, ask the customer to rate their experience as, for example, “Great”, “Medium” or “Poor”. Analyzing these answers for a certain period, you will see whether customers are satisfied with your live chat service.

Most communication tools include a reporting feature allowing to create and analyze various KPI reports.

How to choose the best live chat software

Now that we have discussed the benefits of having a live chat on a website and how to make the most of it, here’s the million-dollar question – how to choose the right live chat software?

While it seems like a major task – as it often is – with the right approach you will choose your perfect live chat solution if you know what to look for. This is what I am going to help you with. In addition, you can check reviews of the best solutions on the market.

Omni-channel experience

There are very few standalone live chat products, while the majority of tools on the market are complex solutions offering multiple customer communication channels. At the same time, when choosing your live chat product, look for the ones that offer communication over the most popular channels:

• Email
• Social media
• Messenger platforms (Facebook Messenger, for example)
• Live chat directly on your website

Targeted messaging

A truly effective live chat tool offers the option of creating multiple message templates to target different leads at the proper times. Set up a number of automated messages to send to users based on their behavior on your website.

For example, you can configure an automated message when the user spends a specified length of time on your pricing page. You can offer assistance with pricing issues and engage the user in a conversation.

Customization options

Your live chat should follow the same corporate style guidelines as the rest of your software products. Thus, look for software that allows sufficient customization. You should be able to insert your logo, apply your company colors and/or themes, use custom icons and buttons, and so on.

Integrations

An effective live chat software product should support integrations with other tools that you are using in your business processes – Slack, Jira, Magento, WordPress, Google Analytics, and many other solutions that help you run your company.

Such integration not only creates a smooth working process for your team. It also improves the customer experience offering them a complete solution for communication with your company. For example, add a “Live Chat” link to your email templates, and they will be able to start a conversation with you directly from the email body.

Mobile support

The number of smartphone users worldwide is now 3.5 billion, and you should consider that fact in planning your communication strategy. Make sure the live chat tool you choose has a mobile version that both your agents and customers can use.

With a mobile chat application, you have much higher chances of engaging and retaining customers who are always on the run and are used to communicating via their smartphones.

Usefulness for lead generation

Like any content that you use on your website and in your customer communication, your live chat should help you in your lead generation efforts. In fact, it is not easy to pinpoint a specific live chat feature that can effectively generate leads. Rather, it is the overall chat performance and the customer experience it creates that makes the difference.

When can your live chat generate leads? When it satisfies the following criteria:

• It is real-time
• It is personalized
• It engages users via smartly targeted messages
• It is mobile-friendly
• It provides meaningful analytical data

Bottom line

I hope this analysis of live chat best practices and selection criteria will help you make the most of this powerful communication tool. When used smartly, live chat can really make a difference and bring your marketing campaigns to a brand new level.

Happy chatting!

About the Author

Lidia Bondarenko is a PR and outreach specialist at HelpCrunch, an all-in-one customer communication platform. Her professional experience encompasses customer service improvement, social media marketing, and SEO. Her free time she spends searching for new marketing trends and tv shows, and practicing yoga. You can follow Lidia on Twitter @Liya_Bondarenko.

Malene Wessel explains what you should look for in a tailor-made chat solution vendor.

Off-the-shelf chat solutions may be fine for some businesses, but what about your business’ unique requirements? You don’t have to settle for a standard, pre-set solution. You have options. To find the best supplier, look for the following characteristics in a tailor-made chat solution vendor:

Focused on your specific requirements: One size does not fit all. Your chat vendor should recognize this and work with you to produce the specific type of solution you’re seeking. If they don’t, perhaps they aren’t the best partner to select.

Scalable: You know that your business will grow and change over time. You certainly don’t have to start with one solution and then move to another. Why not stay with the same chat platform as your business evolves? For this very reason it’s important to look for a solution that will adapt regardless of how many operators you have in your customer service or sales departments.

Eliminates language barriers: It’s highly likely that your sales and service agents are communicating with people in more than one language. And a study by Common Sense Advisory showed that 75% of people prefer to buy products in their native language. So, you can’t afford to simply set up your chat solution to spell check in only one language. Why would you want to do that when you can spell check in multiple languages at the same time? Having this capability ensures clear, error-free communications in your customers’ preferred language in a timely fashion.

Customization based on department, product category, and marketing campaign: The ability to vary chat button design, proactive chat settings, and agent routing allows you to create different experiences for various customers. This enables you to tailor these features based on the web page, product type, and marketing strategy. Plus, your agents will know the context of chats routing to them and be prepared with relevant answers more quickly.

Individualized customer service: Just like the solution you seek, your chat solution vendor should be able to provide you with the unique service that you need. They should realize that your needs are different than those of other companies and take the time to completely understand them. When they have the perspective that your success equals their success, you know you’ve found the right vendor partner.

Designate how your chat box appears: You should be able to designate whether your chat box opens inside your webpage or is a pop up in a new browser window when customers initiate chat. If your chat widget won’t do this, you don’t have a completely tailor-made chat solution.

CRM Integration: Your chat solution needs to integrate with whatever CRM you use. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on the collection of a lot of valuable customer and prospect data as well as the added level of service this type of information facilitates. Don’t lag behind your competition because your agents are less prepared for valuable communications with returning site visitors. Be sure you’re able to take advantage of CRM integration.

Multiple APIs: Before you select a live chat solution, make sure that it can seamlessly integrate with all your core business systems. This can mean the difference between efficient and inefficient operations after implementation.

Pre-chat banner with custom messaging: This capability allows you to present an offer, message, or self-help page link to customers while they’re waiting for an operator to pick up their chat. Provide your customers with an extra layer of service with this type of customization.

Flexible Pricing: Customizing your chat solution means that you receive neither too many or two few features. It should contain all the features you need or want and none will be wasted. This way you will get the best value for your specific workflow.

As you can see, there are many important considerations when selecting a vendor for your tailor-made chat solution. When you take these all into account, you will identify the best partner to create your customized chat solution platform.

About the Author

Malene Wessel is Head of Marketing at Live Guide Chat. For more information on how live chat can help companies increase sales and customer satisfaction while reducing their service costs visit liveguidechat.com.

People have become increasingly concerned about the security of personal and sensitive information they share. This is especially true when communicating online.

According to a survey of 24,000 people in 12 countries, conducted by Verint and Opinium Research revealed that trust and transparency are the keys to building a good customer experience. In fact, 89 percent of these people said they want to know how secure their personal information is when dealing with an organization.

Live chat is designed to enhance the customer experience. If it doesn’t build trust, it could hamper your ability to build a trusted relationship with customers. So, what live chat features provide security so your customers are comfortable doing business with your organization?

With the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now in force, compliance is essential. Be sure that your chat solution hosts, processes and encrypts data in full accordance with the rule laid out in the new GDPR regulations so that all your data is secure. You can learn more about GDPR here.

Secure chat is 256-bit SSL encrypted. SSL is a standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a server and a client—typically a web server (website) and a browser. It allows sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and login credentials to be transmitted securely.

Normally, data sent between browsers and web servers is sent in plain text. This leaves you vulnerable to eavesdropping. If an attacker is able to intercept all data being sent between a browser and a web server, they can see and use that information.

SSL secures millions of peoples’ data on the Internet every day in the course of online transactions or when transmitting confidential information. Internet users have come to associate online security with the lock icon representing a SSL-secured or https website.

A cloud-based SaaS live chat solution is more secure because security updates are always current as they are completed by the fully-hosted provider. Because this type of solution is in the cloud, data access is strictly regulated to ensure no risk of data integrity and security.

Customer data protected by data masking increases security and privacy by hiding sensitive information. Since customers may not be aware of the risks of sharing these details during a chat session, it is best to enable this feature in your chat solution. Doing so results in higher security and privacy compliance for targeted information since it is never shown and can never be stored.

IP-Restriction allows you to control access to your chat agents. You can create a “members only” access by creating an IP access list so you always know who’s chatting with your agents. Secured with end-to-end encryption, only traffic from designated IP addresses gain entry.

This facilitates sand-boxing and secures data beyond typical security features of chat solutions. With a sandbox system you make sure that certain pieces of malware aren’t able to exploit systems with loose memory rules, causing havoc. Also, some parts of the memory are only for internal system executables. If a piece of malware is able to affect that part, then your computer is going to have problems. Having a sand box ready stops those problems in their tracks.

Online security is important to your prospects and customers. Make sure you include these critical security features in your live chat solution. They will help you build trust and stronger, longer lasting relationships.

About the Author

Malene Wessel is Head of Marketing at Live Guide Chat. For more information on how live chat can help companies increase sales and customer satisfaction while reducing their service costs visit liveguidechat.com.

Live chat solutions can help organizations increase efficiency and reduce costs. In fact, Aberdeen Group found that performance gains of companies using live chat results in agent utilization rates of 28.4% as well as a 6.8% decrease in average cost per customer contact.

These figures are too good to ignore! So, just how does live chat help do this? Below is a list of features that will increase efficiency. Not all chat solutions offer all features.

Multitasking – Experienced agents are able to handle up to 4-5 chats concurrently. The actual number varies based on the industry and complexity of the query. The ability to handle multiple chats at a time makes customer service reps far more productive than phone agents, who are only able to assist one customer at a time.

Prepared responses (a.k.a. canned responses) – Having the most common responses prepared and ready to use facilitates faster responses. They free up your agents to focus on unique questions and prevent typographical errors too.

Various modes – Customer service representatives are able to reach faster resolution with customers through chat, versus phone or email. This is because they have more ways to communicate such as audio or video chat, sharing documents, co-browse, and offering remote assistance. These options all allow the interaction to involve agents actually showing, in addition to telling, with written or spoken words. Plus it enables agents to see what they need to see and convey what is needed in a shorter timeframe. The result, service reps are able to assist more customers in less time.

Provides advance information – Preview chat and forms allow your service personnel to gain additional and in-depth insights before the customer has even finished typing their message. This allows them to start working on their responses in advance of the customer submitting their message. This means shorter wait times for customers and faster answers to their questions.

Teamwork – When your agents encounter issues or inquiries where they don’t know how to answer — no problem. TEAM chat room capabilities facilitate behind-the-scenes communication with those who can guide them. This results in faster resolution for the customer, with the continuity of one rep and, in the process, agents learn from one another.

Routing of chats – Automated routing to support operators most knowledgeable of the customer inquiry topic ensures expeditious responses and resolutions. This is true because the agent is able to respond more quickly without searching through reference materials or seeking additional information from other reps.

History & Logs – Previous chat and site visit history shorten chat lengths. It provides agents with background information and prevents customers from the frustration of having to convey it. This allows service reps to get up to speed and address the matter at hand in a more timely fashion.

Identifies and prioritizes training – Comprehensive reporting helps with identification and prioritization of training needs. This information reveals who is most efficient, who needs improvement, and what they need to improve.

Quick setup and easy to use – For the solutions that are cloud based the set up is fast and easy and uses minimizes installation labor as well as the need to pay staff for lengthy training periods.

So, now you can see why live chat increases the efficiency of service reps while reducing related costs.

About the Author

Malene Wessel is Head of Marketing at Live Guide Chat. For more information on how live chat can help companies increase sales and customer satisfaction while reducing their service costs visit liveguidechat.com

eDigital’s customer service benchmark indicated live chat has the highest satisfaction level of 73%, when compared with other customer service channels. Wondering why this is so? Let’s take a closer look at seven reasons why live chat produces this high level of satisfaction.

1. Faster responses: No need to wait for an email response, navigate an automated phone system, listen to pre-recorded messages, or wait on hold. Live chat features such as Chatbots and Click-to-Chat allow your service team to help customers on demand. Co-browsing, Remote Assistance, and Remote View give your agents the ability to see what the customer is seeing as well as show them where to find what they need and how to resolve their issues more quickly.

2. Timely responses: Agents are able to answers questions as they arise, on demand, with Chatbots and Click-to-Chat. Mobile Chat and Broad Platform Support make it possible for customers to engage service agents quickly from mobile or desktop devices and various platforms such iOS, Android, Mac or PC.

3. Less effort: Live chat solutions enable customers to engage agents without having to pick up the phone, launch email, or leave your website. Features such as Chatbots and Click-to-Chat make it easy for site visitors to get questions answered, or issues addressed, with minimal effort.

4. Meets customers where they are: Wherever customers happen to be, capabilities like Mobile Chat and Broad Platform Support, allow them to connect with your service team from their mobile or desktop devices on iOS, Android, Mac, or PC platforms.

5. More first-call resolutions: Your agents gain the ability to view while showing and telling through live chat features such as Audio & Video Chat, Co-Browsing, File Transfer, Remote Assistance, and Remote View. This allows them to resolve customer issues during the first call more frequently, because a picture is worth a thousand words.

6. The ability to address a variety of issues: Sometimes it takes a face-to-face or audio conversation to address an issue more expediently. Audio & Video Chat capability enables your agents to seamlessly transition from traditional written chat to an audio or video call. Co-Browsing, File Transfer, Remote Assistance, and Remote View allow service reps to view customer documents, or their computer screens, as well as share documents with them, guide them through processes or your website plus a variety of other visual exchanges. These capabilities, when combined, facilitate addressing various issues that might not otherwise be resolved through one alone.

7. More personal service experience: Features like Audio & Video Chat, Co-Browsing, Remote Assistance, and Remote View make your customers feel like your agents are in the same room with them. The customer’s ability to see service team members and be guided by them, as if they were sitting side-by-side, builds trust, communicates more clearly, and gives customers what they need, more easily.

As you can see, there are many different features that help your service agents please customers during live chat interactions. The results are happy customers that are more satisfied. Not only that, they’ll want to continue to use your products or services, and isn’t that the goal?

About the Author

Malene Wessel is Head of Marketing at Live Guide Chat. For more information on how live chat can help companies increase sales and customer satisfaction while reducing their service costs visit liveguidechat.com

Many of these omni-channel solutions try to address all possible channels of communication and don’t specialize in any one. This causes components of these systems not to include as comprehensive an array of features as dedicated chat vendors who specialize in true live chat solutions.

Below is a brief description of some of the features you might be missing out on by not selecting a chat solution from a vendor specializing in live chat.

Video Chat

Using live video chat brings a new dimension to online customer service and sales.

With a high-quality video chat solution you are able to demo your products to customers. Suddenly, the unknown, distant customer service representative is replaced with a personal, consultative and live sales associate, giving customers the same level of service found in brick and mortar situations combined with the convenience and speed of the Internet.

File sharing

This function allows your agents to more efficiently assist customers and prospects during a chat session. They’re able to securely share documents without exiting chat or communicating through alternate channels. The result, increased customer satisfaction and more one-call resolutions.

Preview chat

Allowing operators to see what customers are typing in real time through preview chat enables them to prepare responses more quickly. They’re also able to identify and queue up previously-prepared responses while customers are still creating their messages. This reduces overall service time and increases agent efficiency.

Comprehensive reporting

Gain deeper insight into customer behaviour and improve contact center efficiency with comprehensive reporting. Advanced live chat reporting tools make it easy to monitor key metrics and optimize processes for both customers and agents. This increases customer and agent satisfaction while aiding in consistent agent performance improvements.

Surveys and Forms

Provides the ability to easily integrate customized online forms and surveys before, during, and after live chat sessions. This provides additional intelligence to your chat operators so they can more efficiently handle customer requests. Pre-chat forms help service agents resolve questions more quickly. Forms issued during sessions help convert potential customers into qualified leads. Automated end-of-session surveys help ensure agents are meeting customer needs and providing optimal service. These forms are also useful when agents are off-line and to gather key prospect information.

Team Collaboration

Allows each agent to see, at any given moment, which other operators are currently online, which department each one is in, and if they are busy or available. It facilitates internal live chats with peers while the agent, who’s initiating this behind the scenes interaction, is in an active chat with a customer. Agents may also use this feature to check updates on operator and customer events.

Categorization of chat

This allows the collection of additional data concerning chats, categorizing them by type of chat or topic of chat. May be useful in service center staffing as well as improvement of self-service knowledge base for improved customer satisfaction.

Customization

Why settle for a standard, off-the-shelf chat solution? One size does not fit all. You deserve to have branded chat buttons, a customized interface, and other tailor-made features.

Of course, all omni-channel and multi-channel solutions are different, so you may be missing out on even more live chat capabilities by settling for an add-on instead of a true live chat solution. If you think that you and your customers deserve the best live chat experience, you should select a complete and specialized chat solution for your company.

About the Author

Malene Wessel is Head of Marketing at Live Guide Chat. For more information on how live chat can help companies increase sales and customer satisfaction while reducing their service costs visit liveguidechat.com.

If you get live chat right, it can deliver major advantages all round. After all, the whole idea of implementing live chat is to help assist customers in finding the answers to their questions in order to reduce shopping cart abandonment. On top of this, it eases the inbound burden on the contact centre from having to answer repetitive calls that could easily be answered via a quick live chat session.

What is important is to make live chat work for your needs. There’s no point in simply having a chat function on your site that either isn’t integrated into your overall contact strategy or doesn’t deliver the intelligence or analytics needed to track how successful it is in supporting the customer service function.

Today, the pressure is on brands to deliver a consistent, always-available customer service function across all mediums. Customers today expect a seamless omni-channel interaction with brands, where they are guided to where they want to be, in one journey, regardless of the method used to contact, while having the ability to switch seamlessly between devices without having to start the conversation from scratch.

All of this is possible, and here, George Skaff, CMO of TouchCommerce provides six reasons live chat benefits brands by keeping digital consumers satisfied:

1. More Immediate Support: Live chat enables instant contact with a company in a way that cannot be rivalled by emailing or calling customer service. Live chat agents are able to walk customers through a sale right then and there, at the time that they are in the buying process. The immediate feedback keeps the customer from leaving the site while waiting for answers.

2. Virtual Assistance Is Today’s Reality: We now have the ability to seamlessly integrate virtual assistant technology with live chat, meaning brands can offer an around-the-clock chat service to support customers. It also means that if the virtual assistant is unable to help the client, the interaction can be picked-up by a live agent who can see the context of the conversation and help the customer. Virtual assistant technology can also connect to customer data in CRM systems, meaning account specific questions can be answered.

3. Monitor and Measure: Live chat can show you where customers need to get help in the purchasing journey. It delivers intelligence to better understand customers’ journeys so the right service is provided at the right place and time. Feedback tools in virtual agents can also obtain immediate customer insights by asking ‘did this help you today?’, which can be used to assess and adapt how future interactions are handled.

4. Multi-Tasking Mania: With consumers’ growing attachment to electronic devices, they have become expert multi-taskers! It’s not uncommon to see a family watching TV together while each of them is on a separate device, either working on their laptop, texting a friend, or following a Twitter feed about the show they are watching. Live chat enables the customer to continue doing what they are doing while receiving personal customer service. It’s therefore important to ensure that your brand is responding to queries received via all digital methods – whether mobile web, SMS, social media and more – and offering the ability to connect to a live chat session.

5. Jump the Queue: Customers like the idea that live chat removes the need (and related frustrations) of waiting in a queue to speak to a telephone-based agent. It means that waiting and call costs are removed for customers, while brands are able to handle multiple interactions at one time, with several simultaneous chat sessions possible. It also means that service teams have to deal with fewer calls from frustrated customers who have had to queue for service.

6. Use Chat Trails to Your Advantage: Brands are able to track, monitor and review live chat transcripts to update websites, adjust information provided and assist in future training of customer service representatives.

About the Author

George Skaff is CMO at TouchCommerce. George has over 25 years of progressive experience in the computer industry, and has demonstrated a proven business expertise in marketing and strategic partnerships for various sized companies in high technology and services areas.

When it comes to business, customer service is crucial. Every business is looking for better ways of delivering high quality customer service through cost-effective methods.

Over the past few years, customer service technology has improved to help close the gap between meeting customer expectations and staying within a budget.

This strategy of managing a company’s interactions with clients, potential sales, and customers through the use of technology, customer support, and marketing is called Customer Relationship Management, or CRM.

As technology has improved, its role in the CRM strategy has continued to increase. Here are a few examples of these types of technologies in action.

Autoresponder

Depending on the type of business that you are running, an autoresponder can be a great form of customer service technology to start utilizing. This customer service software will automatically send out an email to customers once they have placed an order from off of your site. This is a good way for the customer to know that their order has been received and is being processed. You can include contact information, shipping timelines, and information about ordering processes with the emails that are sent out. This helps your customer feel safe and secure that their purchase went through.

Voice Recognition and Call Routing

Voice recognition is a popular software that allows customers to speak a request in the phone rather than dial buttons. Rather than wasting employee time on taking calls and then just having to transfer them, it allows the customer to find the right department first through an automated process. Whenever voice recognition is used in conjunction with call routing, your customers are able to reach a knowledgeable employee very quickly.

EDI

This form of customer support stands for electronic data interchange. This is a great way for organizations to communicate with each other through their computer systems. They can exchange all of their data electronically so that companies don’t have to spend time and money on employee resources. The structure, content, and frequency of the data transfers can all be agreed upon beforehand.

Online Chat

These days, customer service is often given to clients without the need of seeing them face-to-face. Online chat is one great way to accomplish this by using instant messaging technology. The client and the customer service representative are able to communicate through a small pop-up window on the screen. The advantages to a system like this are that the customer service rep is able to help multiple customers at the same time and there can also be verbatim records of the conversations that took place.

As you can see, there are a variety of different customer service technologies out there to help organizations perform better. You have to be careful, however, that you are not using so many forms of customer service technology that you forget about the tried and true methods of good old-fashioned customer service.

More important than any technology is the idea of “getting to know” your customers. Most people would rather talk to a real person than have to work with a machine. If your automated customer support methods are frustrating your customers more than they are helping them, it may be time to rethink your customer relationship management strategy.

Customer feedback is something that a lot of companies pay good money for with surveys and forms. With a solid customer service plan, you can get that feedback for free through the interactions of clients and customer service reps.

The main goal of any CRM strategy is to help your customers feel like their business is valued. If your customers feel valued by your company, they are much more likely to come back for future products and services. Superior customer service can be the factor that turns a casual customer into a loyal client.

This can spill over into other aspects of your business model including advertising and potential leads. Since every company is so different, you will need to find the right combination of technologies and employee support to help your business function efficiently.

While technologies can be picked on a trial and error basis, solid customer service principles cannot. Get to know your customers first, then add technology and software to your CRM strategy to take your business to the next level.