Running a large-scale online business has become more of a challenge these days. Many and many companies are joining the fray and the standards are quite high. Customer expectations have skyrocketed: faster load times, fully featured solutions, much lower costs, reliability and so on - the list is too long. And if they don't see the whole package then you risk losing them on the spot - or worse, poorly-worded (bad reviews, negative word of mouth, etc.).
Therefore, as long as possible, it is important to keep your perception of your customers strong at an ever increasing frequency. For a long time email was primarily a means of doing this for an online business and has its pros and cons. Now a new channel is gaining traction - this is the live chat service capability being made online by many sites. It is direct and effective and at the same time raises the bar in terms of how fast and well thought out you should be for the customer '.
Suggested Read: 6 Ways To Boost Your Business With Live Chat Support Software
We offer an online inventory system - a very mission-critical functionality for some businesses - and well-timed and up to point support is critical. Thus, we have jumped at the opportunity and have been using live chat services for business extensively for some time now. Out of that experience, we put together a cheat letter when using live chat service, which helps keep everyone on the team focused.
So here it goes:
1. Before answering, we assign ourselves a chat to avoid more than one person sending a reply together.
2. Obviously, the faster you answer, the better. A 1-2 minute response time is ideal (visitors spend an average of 2 minutes on our one-page site), and 3-4 minutes manage the most common response time. However, even though we are talking about a request that whatever reason has remained unanswered for hours, we still say something because they can revisit the site and will then see the answer.
3. If a question is generic, answer it generally and ask for special requirements so that you can provide a useful, informative response (yes we support X, but we do not support Y).
4. If a question is specific, answer briefly and to the point - ask for a maximum of two short sentences - or an explanation.
5. If this is a specific question for which you do not know the answer, you can always say 'Please let me pay attention to this and bring you back - leave us your email so that we can send you the answer'.
6. Before writing answers, check and use canned responses where possible - whenever you are likely to write something, keep adding to their list. This is very important to reduce the reaction time.
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7. Before writing the answer, also check the knowledge base and answer using the link from it. This is very important to reduce the response workload overall.
8. If we are talking about visitors to the website - and not about actual users - the primary goal is to get them signed up for testing there. A secondary goal is to give them your email, or to setup a demo call (which will also earn us email). Test and demo call requests should be made with a link to make it easy for them to immediately understand what they need to do.
9. If we are talking about real users then the primary goal is to give them the correct answer. There are two secondary goals:
- To train them to use the knowledge base so that they answer on their own - always refer to the Knowledge Base when given a chance, and
- To ask for a review in our site of preference - Customers are at their most sensitive when their questions have been addressed
10. Another goal to keep in mind when interacting with a visitor or customer is to understand what features they need. Requests by visitors visit Pipedrive for future follow-up, requests by users go to Trello to enrich our product development efforts. Both channels of feedback end in a backlog of features that are evaluated and implemented.
11. The ultimate goal is to enrich the knowledge base with any request that is not already included. Once the session is over, see if what you have written can be recreated as a knowledge base article. Generally, any answer requested is either already written (and can be found in the Knowledge Base) or can be created on the spot (and added to the Knowledge Base). Either way, answering a question is used many times.
Suggested Read: How Live Chat support can Impact Your Customer Satisfaction
12. While it is a good idea to keep them talking, answering, and keeping the chat going, in reality, only a few matters are needed. Any answer you give can be the final message for that person because you can lose your attention very fast so go for the original goals as much as possible.
Live chat services for business can seem easy and simple - we are doing this everyday for our personal lives, so how hard can it be, right? But when it is done in a commercial context, it all starts to get more granular. This is a skill that needs to be mastered, from making sure you hit a quick response time to actually achieving the goals.
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