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Online Chat Game Changer for Customer Service

Live chat has been around for many years, and is well documented as providing quicker and more convenient customer service, leading to happier customers, and website visitors more likely to make a first time and repeat purchase. With the more recent proliferation of Facebook Messenger and Slack and other chat tools for internal communication and collaboration, customers are more and more looking for chat options to solve their problems and get answers quickly.
Call center worker accompanied by her team.

We have been using an online chat tool within Enudge for a year now, and have also found it to provide greater opportunity for us to interact in a timely way with prospects, and has improved our client’s satisfaction.

There are two distinct ways that chat can be used to provide customer service:

  1. Real people ready to chat online to solve a person’s problems.
  2. Bots – computer programs which, at their most sophisticated, respond to natural language questions to provide humans with the answers they seek, without the need for a human

Having real people responding to customer enquiries via online chat can be more efficient and effective than dealing with phone calls in the following ways:

  • customer service personnel can often deal with multiple enquiries at a time, saving on-hold wait time for the customer
  • the customer can submit their question, and leave their screen at the place of their question if they do have to wait, and continue on with other things without having a phone call tieing up their phone line
  • if a customer service operator doesn’t respond in a certain period of time, chat tools can often be configured to request contact details to follow the person up at a later time
  • providing customer support in writing avoids issues of difficulty with spoken accents and poor VoIP lines

Online chat tools also provide a range of other features over call centres:

  • build a knowledge base of responses over time
  • easier access to data, such as common questions, for the full customer support team and management
  • ability to easily hand more difficult questions over to a specialist support person, with full details of the response immediately available
  • bots contained within some chat tools can utilise a knowledge base to provide suggested answers to the customer’s question based on previous answers, thus providing the solution more quickly
  • allow customer service people to more easily work remotely

There are numerous chat solutions available for adding chat to your website, web application, or mobile app. Many of these work across both website and mobile apps, allowing you to easily co-ordinate responses across all channels. The tool you choose will depend on the functionality that you require, and the platform in which it needs to operate. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like our help to choose and implement chat.

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