Do Consumers Prefer Live Chat over Other Customer Service Methods

Customer service is a booming industry in contemporary times. It is a service of dire requirement and necessity. Every business that deals in goods and services have a customer service department. This department’s primary function is to serve the customers in case they face any problems or have questions and queries regarding the products. Earlier the only mode of coming in contact with the business was either through email, phone calls or in-person interaction. But now there are several businesses that function solely on e-commerce wherein there’s no scope of personally meeting up with the customer service representatives. Phone calls at a time would go unanswered due to a large number of calls made to the company per day and emails went unnoticed. But things have changed now. The technology has evolved. Now there’s a facility or software in existence that a company uses that allows the customer to get instantly in touch with the customer service representatives. This software is called Live Chat. Live Chat is a chat service wherein the customer can chat with the customer care representative over the internet. It is fundamentally an instant messaging service like a Facebook messenger or any other kind of messenger.

In this article we will see how the customers prefer Live Chat over other means of customer service facilities:

1. Easily accessible

Live Chat is like a pop-up chat that can be found on the company’s website at any given point on any given page. It is a 24-hour service. The best part about live chat is that it does not require a customer service representative to be active on it at all time. The software has been designed in such a manner that it gives auto-generated responses to customer queries. An even bigger advantage is that the software is programmed in such a manner that the responses that it gives have the customer service skills of a representative, so then there is a level of trust in the customer when he is describing his problems and he doesn’t feel like he’s talking to a computer where in fact, he is actually interacting with a bot. A customer care representative is responsible for monitoring a number of live chats at one time and will only take over when things get complicated. Otherwise, the software is self-sufficient.

2. Increased productivity

Live chat itself acts as a customer service representative so the burden from the actual customer service representative is reduced. The work is basically delegated as the Live Chat takes care of the customer queries by itself. This increases the productivity of the customer service representative. He is now able to focus on more important and complicated matters at hand. Most of the time the customer queries are basic and can be resolved by the bits themselves. This helps in saving the customer service representative’s time. This increase in the customer service representative’s productivity also increases the productivity of the company and also builds higher customer satisfaction.

3. Increased leads

The most important function of Live Chat is that it serves quick responses. It is because of these quick responses that there is an increase in the sales leads of the company. It has been seen that in the case of online shopping, there are times that a customer leaves the company’s website because there is no or slow response to their queries. But with Live Chat, this problem has also been curtailed. The fast and quick response function of the software has shown an increase in leads of customers of the company. This increases the profit and success margin of the company and also leaves a satisfied customer. When a customer is satisfied with the customer service of a company the chances of that customer returning to the company for their services again is very high.

4. Customer history

Live Chat has another function that saves the past transaction history of a particular customer. This makes the process for a customer service representative easier as if the customer returns to the customer service department with a similar or same problem, the customer service representative dealing with that problem at this point in time would have a clear picture of the past interaction of the customer with the company because Live Chat save such information. This saves time and effort of the customer service representative while dealing with a customer.

5. Marketing strategies

Live chat is designed in a way that it gives personal attention to the customer that brews marketing strategies that help the company advance. It is because of this feature that the customers are attracted towards the business and they tend to return to the company’s website for the same shopping experience. It increases customer satisfaction and also attracts other customers towards it. The existing customers tend to give the company good customer reviews that enable other customers to try the goods and services of the company. Customers tend to trust other customer reviews. So good customer service of the company leads its customers to give the company good reviews and increase their sales.