Who are you?
I am Abir Ahmed, marketing manager of REVE Chat.
Why are you writing about this topic?
Well, I wanted to bring forth the secret recipe for leading entrepreneurs, corporate, websites, eCommerce business and leading start-ups. Also, I wanted to share my prowess and deep research on modern market and its ethics. I hope that my readers are benefited with the pro tips that I have shared.
What is your expertise on this topic?
Along with being a marketing professional, I have the domain expertise for customer support & sales. And live chat software services has brought a revolution for sales lead management and online chat system supported portals.
Whether you are looking for live chat assistance service for your online business or require customer service and support for brand management? Your business needs smooth relationship with customers. The communication between customer and client is essential for creating a positive brand image with positive goodwill. And all this is possible with live chat tool.
I will continue sharing blogs on how live chat is transforming the customer service in the modern time.
Customer experience (CX) is the next frontier for businesses in the modern marketplace. Today’s customers are not just happy with better quality products at low prices and smart advertising. Delivering great CX is a key differentiating factor from your competitors along with a personalized, customer-centric approach to build your brand loyalty.
In order to deliver great customer experience adding virtual assistants has become vital when your live chat support is not just enough. According to IDG, 89% of enterprises plan to adopt or have already adopted a digital-first business strategy.
With the deployment of AI chatbots, businesses gain the ability to:
- Automate the different business functions process to save cost and time.
- Boost business and team productivity by meeting the key metric - first response time that helps customers in quick decision making based on outputs.
- Predict customer preferences by using the insights to deliver a better, personalized customer experience.
5 ways how to use live chat and chatbots together to deliver a great customer experience
Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, chatbots act as a catalyst along with live chat for your sales or customer support. But only using live chat and chatbots in the right way at the right time, will help your business to deliver superior customer experience.
Here are five ways how to use live chat software and AI chatbots in the correct way to deliver customers the best of both worlds.
1. 24x7 customer support
Response time is one of the important attributes of good customer service. Customers expect instant response and the long wait time is one of the top 3 reasons why customers leave your website.
Live chat offers an instant response assuring the lowest queue time as compared to other communication channels. With live chat software, your customer support agents can easily:
- Offer real time support
- Handle a maximum 5 to 6 conversations at the same time
If your customers require answers in less than 30 seconds then chatbot is the best option for your business. Chatbot Report says 21% of consumers see chatbots as the easiest way to contact a business. Chatbots promptly answer customer’s basic queries 24x7, when the support team is not available.
Tips:
- Initiate chat with a chatbot and collect visitor information and answer basic queries. If the chat becomes complex direct it to the right department for better support.
- Measure your customer satisfaction score regularly to find out if your customers are comfortable with chatbot support or not.
2. Cost efficiency
Whenever a business decision is made the first thing thought about is cost. An effective cost management strategy helps in making structured financial decisions that help to increase business revenue and reduce costs.
Live chat is an affordable communication channel for SMBs and an excellent way to reduce customer service, sales, and marketing costs. With live chat tool, you can streamline the business process and improve your brand image.
Implementing chatbots helps businesses to save customer service costs of adding more agents. Hiring more support agents requires additional costs and time. The costs may be in terms of salaries, training, and infrastructure.
Juniper Research estimates that chatbots will help businesses save more than $8 billion per year by 2022. Bots help businesses to save cost by:
- Scaling their chat support during busy hours
- Automating routine business processes
Bots enable a simpler and seamless brand experience for customers along with curtailing cost and resources for your business significantly.
3. Scalability
Businesses that offer only live chat support face certain challenges when there is a sudden rise in traffic. They might not know when they need to add more support agents for handling chats. The other is the cost of hiring more agents, their training, salaries, etc.
Implementing a chatbot can overcome all the above challenges. Where the live support agents can handle 2 to 3 conversations at a time, chatbots can be easily scaled to manage thousands of chats. Irrespective of the time and volume chatbots answer instantly to every query.
Implementing a chatbot for a restuarant business can easily handle when the demands go high without missing a single order. Both you and your customers are happy. Big brands like Taco Bell and Dominos are using chatbots to arrange delivery of parcels.
4. Saves time
Time is money in business.
Both live chat and AI chatbots help in saving an abundant of business time. But when compared with each other chatbots help to make the most of yours.
Chatbots offers the primary support that acts as a filter to the customer request before it is directed to the live support team. They provide a faster response for all the FAQs and significantly reduce cost and time.
How can chatbots help to save time for your business?
- Automating the information-based queries helps the agents to focus on crucial issues that need human support.
- Chatbots are active 24*7 to deliver immediate response after business hours.
JPMorgan Chase & Co is the best example here that launched COIN, a bot to save time. The bot can analyze complex legal contracts faster and more efficiently than human lawyers.
5. Customer engagement
Whosoever runs a business knows the importance of customer engagement. Research by Bain & Company says, “businesses that successfully engage with their customers were able to increase the customer spend by 20% to 40%.”
Live chat software allows businesses to communicate instantly with customers not letting them wait for a long time. Customers are engaged with the help of live engagement tools like video chat and co-browsing.
The chat conversations can be made interactive by face to face video chat for technical assistance and collaborate with the customer browser for complex form fill up with co-browsing for a better in person experience.
Chatbots take customer engagement to a new level. Here are some tips you can follow:
- Bots deliver immediate responses to your customers what they actually expect and boost customer satisfaction.
- Chatbots analyze customer responses and provide related information based on the customer details and history.
- AI bots are the fastest response channel to communicate with your customers and also helps to save time and cost for business and customers.
- When you add chatbots to your existing communication channels it delivers more options for your customers to engage with your business.
Conclusion
It is very important to maintain the right balance in using live chat and chatbots to deliver a delightful customer experience. You should understand your business needs and based on that you can choose which is the ideal fit for your business.
However, the best approach to using live chat and chatbots is to use them both.
Using chatbots for initiating conversations to answer the basic queries and direct the complex conversations for human support. Following this hybrid approach will deliver the best experience of both worlds boosting customer satisfaction and retention.