Live chat customer support is a must when you need to raise the bar on your customer service. There are, however, certain things you need to know and do so you can deploy this awesome feature in the best way possible. Depending on the implementing, the live chat support feature can be the top dog of your customer service, bringing you 3-4 new customers monthly, or it can become something which is more of a burden than actual useful utility.
But, of course, we are here to help you integrate the live chat in your business with these four factors you need to consider:
1. Get to know your customers - the efficiency of the live chat support heavily depends on the type of customers you have. Basically, it is much more useful if you are consumer-oriented company, because the volume of conversation is much more as a whole. If you are running a business to business company, you should concentrate on the long-term relationship with your customers, which will slightly drop down the usefulness of the live chat, but you will still find it quite nice when it comes to fast communication.
2. Define work hours - since it is "live" chat, the response time is of a vital importance. A good response time is between 2 and 20 seconds and you should get in there if you want people to actually contact you. The other thing is the work hours. You should consider a 24/7 live chat support if you want things to go smoothly, because most people who contact companies through live chat need answers right now, and if the receive a automated answer to write an email with the problem, they just might never get back to using your products. However, if you are running a small business and you just can't afford a 24/7 customer support, customers will understand, but at least try to support them for more than 8 hours on weekdays;
3. Train your employees - live chat support isn't for everyone and not everybody can do it. You need the right person for the job. Keep in mind that the best phone support employee might not be the best chat support employee. You need to hire a multi-tasker who can take it seriously and react fast. Set some rules for chatting and train your employees so they can meet your expectations;
4. Use metrics - since you need to keep things efficient, you need to follow how your live chat support handles things. Try to measure the metrics since this is critical for your customer support. Track down the conversation length, dropped chats, the number of chats per agent, the time of reply, the number of solved problems per chat etc. All this metrics will help you measure how efficient your live-chat support is and how good your employees handle it.