Imagine walking into a store and there is a cashier but no salesperson. That’s how a customer feels when they visit a website without a live chat option. You struggle for information, jump through multiple products to find the right fit, and eventually walk out or abandon your cart.
Your next customer is on your website: Talk to them
It can be established that live chat is an essential attribute for every customer catering website. Around 79% of customers have claimed to prefer live chat to any other form of communication. With a rise in demand for software, every business is considering its implementation.
12 Live Chat Requirements Consider Before Its Implementation
In this blog, I will help you identify your live chat requirements, and what are the essential features that live chat software should offer. Here, are a few things you need to consider before choosing your live chat solution.
1. Compatibility and Integration:
The first concern is to ensure that the software is compatible to the various platforms and devices of your customers. The solution must run smoothly on all devices, catering to all operating systems. As a business owner, you cannot control what devices or on which OS your customer is using. It is better to choose a chat support solution that runs on all and if not the most popular platforms like different web browsers, android and iOS apps.
2. Cobrowsing and Screen Sharing:
While interacting with customers there will be need to browse together with the customer so that the customer can find the right product or the right option easily. Co-browsing sessions are a great advantage to quickly help the customer find what they are looking for.
Screen sharing sounds similar but it is different as it helps the agent view the customer screen in doing some troubleshooting. Alternatively, the agent can show his screen and share some document, images or video to explain the customer. This is very much relevant where the business is of high touchpoints like selling jewelry or real estate.
3. Video or Audio Chat Integration:
This should be one of your essential live chat requirements especially if you are in B2C business. A video or audio chat integration will allow the customer to request for a more personalised interaction via video or audio. Usually, this is used by customers for complicated issues such as a faulty product or service failure. This also helps customers with their onboarding process, or allows them to get better support remotely. Upon request, the agent can send an invitation link through the chat popup or SMS to initiate the video or audio chat. Most important thing is the one click activation, so that the customer doesn’t have to install libraries or apps to start a video call.
4. Chat Transfer or Chat Conference:
At times, customers do not identify their problems correctly and end up in the wrong department. When this happens over chat, the agent on-task should be able to transfer the customer to the right department, without much hassle. The chat transfer feature will smoothen this process, while reserving the context for the next agent. Due to this, the customer does not have to repeat themselves and waste their times.
There will be instances when your agent may have to bring a subject matter expert / consultant in the chat. With Chat conference capability it will be great to do such conferences, smoothly. These conference over live chat could be text based or even video calls too. This is another must have Live chat requirements that you must consider.
5. CRM Integration:
Most of the business needs to track customer issues as lot of issues that are fielded by the live agents cannot be addressed instantly. So, post the interaction an automated ticket or case can be created. The ability of the live chat to automatically create ticket on selection of the disposition is a must have requirement for live chat.
Also, with a CRM integration, the stored information and the past conversation, will allow your agents to provide a more personalised service when the customer revisits your website.
6. Chatbot Integration for Higher Customer Satisfaction:
The next live chat requirement for your business should be automation. If you are investing in CRM integration, then might as well deploy a chatbot for efficiency. This is highly recommended for e-commerce and finance-based businesses. Based on customer’s journey with the brand, the AI will make relevant recommendations to the customer.
For instance, I am revisiting my bank’s website with the intent of paying my credit card charges. Instead of looking further, I click on the chat option and after one or two questions the AI bot identifies me as an existing customer.
Now, as my information already exists, the chatbot will scout that data and provide me with suggestions/prompts relevant to my account.
In this case, the AI bot realises that I am closer to my payment date and offers me option to pay my credit card charges along with some benefits that can be extended to my credit card. It was a positive nudge and the entire ordeal is over within five minutes. It is extremely efficient, hassle-free and generates complete customer satisfaction.
Source: MobileMonkey
7. Analysis of Your Webpage Visitors:
Sentiment analysis is one of the most essential live chat requirement. Potential customers can visit your website anytime, and your human agents cannot sit idle and have lookout for such visitors. Instead, your chatbots can engage these prospects with proactive popup conversations. While these bots converse with your visitors, they will study the visitor’s intent, request their contact details for lead generations, analyze on which folds of the website they are spending more time, their location and more. You can use this data for lead generation and grow your sales pipeline.
8. Showcase Real-Time Typing:
Customers are often impatient when seeking support. They despise waiting for a response, especially without any assurance. The sooner you respond, the higher is your CSAT score. Hence, with the real-time typing feature, your live agents are able to see that a customer is typing even before the message is sent. This gives the agents sometime in hand to prepare for an answer and respond immediately. Also the customer is able to note that the agent is responding to the request.
9. Canned Response and Knowledge Base:
It is important that your solution also saves agent’s time so they can serve more customers during their shift. Agents waste a lot of time daily, while repeating similar responses throughout the day. With a knowledge base integration, agents can create canned responses based on frequently asked questions and send it to customers. Paired with real-time typing view, this will speed up the process.
10. Screen Capture and Multimedia Support:
Another important live chat requirement is enabling screenshot and supporting multimedia exchange. Customers at times fail to explain their issue thoroughly. Therefore, through screenshots or via photo or video exchange, they can convey their issues more accurately. This allows agents to provide better assistance as well.
11. Multilingual Support:
If you have multilingual support available on IVR, then why not on chat? Extend your support to people who do not speak English. This allows you to serve your international customers and engage a larger demography.
In many countries like India, a people speak different languages. A chat solution that can offer multilingual support is ideal for businesses in such geography.
12. Theme Customization:
The last live chat requirement is the feature to customize your chat window theme. This gives you the freedom to change themes, customize how your chat popup looks, edit chat background, update company logo, edit agent profile or icons and more. These customization options allow you to upgrade and establish your brand persona throughout your website and mobile apps.
Conclusion:
It is already clear that live chat has high potential as a customer support channel. It’s analytical features, super-flexibility and easy-to-use nature, make it a high-demand touchpoint. Implementing live chat on your website is definitely the way to go. However, make sure that your chosen solution meets all your relevant live chat requirements.
This blog originally appears on C-Zentrix.com's Blog Page
