Looking to take your live chat customer service (and your customer satisfaction scores) to the next level. We’re bringing you 10 powerful live chat hacks to help you do just that… along with 5 bonus hacks for your management team.
10 kick-ass live chat hacks
Match your customer’s tone
If it works for FBI hostage negotiators, it’s bound to work for you. Matching your customer’s tone during a conversation shows them that you’re empathetic and you care. It can put a customer at ease and have a positive impact on the way that customer feels about your organization.
It’s much better than being overly formal (to the point of sounding robotic) throughout the conversation, or worse — sounding ultra upbeat when a customer is frustrated beyond belief.
You’d also want to adjust your language style according to the customer so that they can relate to you and are more comfortable interacting with you.
2. Don’t confuse them
This involves not getting confused yourself too. Before you proceed to come up with a solution, check with the customer whether you correctly understood the issue that they are facing. You’d also want to confirm the action that they would like you to take.
When you’re diagnosing or solving the issue, let your customer know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how much time it should take. You’d want to avoid using jargon — your goal is to make life easier for your customer, not to leave them wondering what you said.
3. Be direct
Steer clear of extremely formal and indirect language. You’re trying to solve a problem for a customer, not to impress someone who has a Ph.D. in English.
Your messages shouldn’t read like an email — they should feel like regular, everyday conversation does. Stop using phrases like ‘For the purpose of’ where ‘to’ would suffice, or ‘The majority of’ where ‘most’ would be enough.
It’s live chat — your customers are looking for quick resolution and simple, easily understandable messages, not a letter written by a 19th-century royal.
4. Go beyond text
Don’t limit your communication to text messages — go beyond and make use of other media like images, audio files, videos, documents, etc.
This can supplement your communication and help your customers gain a better understanding of what you are trying to tell them.
5. Use video calls
Some issues can’t be resolved over chat alone. Honestly, sometimes you might come across a problem that your customer can’t even explain on chat. That’s when you resort to video calls with screen sharing.
This would help your customers actually show your agents what issues they are facing and would allow your customer service representatives to walk your customers through the solution.
But you aren’t going to lead with a video call. If you did that for every customer, you’d just end up wasting a lot of time. You’d start with live chat and use a video call as a last resort.
You’d also not want to have to send your customers a link and wait for them to join the call, that’s why you need to have a live chat platform like Engati that has an in-built video calling feature.
6. Speed up your messages with quick replies
You don’t need to type out all your messages manually. A lot of the messages that customer service agents send tend to be repetitive. Instead of typing them out every time, speed up your replies by using a quick reply template that you can send with some minor edits and personalization.
7. Communicate positively
As far as live chat tips go this one seems a tad too obvious. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less important than the others. Create a negative experience for your customers and they’ll focus more on those negative experiences than they would on the positive ones that you create. That would mean that you’d have to create multiple positive experiences.
How do you get around that? Avoid creating those negative experiences in the first place. Just put a positive spin on your messages so that your customers can’t mistake even a neutral one to be negative.
8. Use group conversations when you need them
Sometimes you’re going to need to pull in another agent with expertise in a particular area. Maybe you even need to get someone from your product or tech team on that chat. Rather than getting on a call, you could just add this agent to your chat and resolve the conversation quickly.
9. Monitor user behavior
Looking at your analytics would help you understand user journeys and allow you to see the broader picture of how they interact with your agents. It lets you see which channels they prefer engaging with you over, what languages they prefer chatting in, and much more. This allows you to step up your game, and serve your customers in the best way possible.
10. Go omnichannel
Serving your customers on all the channels they like to use is important, but it isn’t enough. You got to allow your customers to start a conversation on one channel and continue it on whichever channel they choose. For that, you need to have context from the past conversations across those channels without having to manually hunt through your inboxes.
With Engati Live Chat, that’s possible. Our OneView Inbox pulls all your conversations into one place and even stitches these conversations together so that you can access the past ones from your chat window.
5 Bonus live chat hacks for management
Use contextual auto-routing
You don’t want your customers to have to hop across multiple agents before they finally reach an agent that can help them and resolve the issue they’re facing. Rather than forcing them to have multiple conversations with several agents, you can just auto-route these conversations intelligently on the basis of context and historical data to send your customers directly to an agent who is equipped to help them.
2. Track agent performance
Keep an eye on your agents’ and your team’s performance. Your analytics will show you how your agents are performing. You’ll be able to monitor SLAs, resolution times, and much more. This will even allow you to take over sensitive conversations from your agents and handle them quickly, without any delays.
3. Automate the simple queries with chatbots
Don’t waste your agents’ time forcing them to deal with all the repetitive, monotonous queries themselves. Not when you can have an AI-powered chatbot to deal with all of those queries quickly. Your bot could take care of about 80% of your customer queries, allowing your agents to focus on dealing with the complex ones that actually require their attention.
4. Use post-chat surveys
If you want to know how your customers feel about their interaction with your agents, you got to ask them. You can set up post-chat surveys to check with them at the end of the conversations so that you can improve their experience.
5. Go multilingual
When your agents use Engati Live Chat, you get to have multilingual conversations without needing to hire separate teams of agents for every language that your customers speak.
Wondering how? We’ve got two-way auto-translations that allow your customers to chat in their language, while your agents see those messages in their language. Then your agents get to reply in their language, with the messages being translated for your customers to read in their language.
This lets you have multilingual conversations with your customers, without needing to hire more agents.
This article is about “10 Live Chat Hacks you can’t miss out on!” was originally published in engati blogs.
