7 live chat tips for outstanding customer service

Live chat tips give you handles for improving your customer service. You achieve outstanding customer service by giving it plenty of attention. That customer service is an important organ is beyond dispute; it is of course the customer's first real point of contact with the company. Bit by bit you improve your customer service and it therefore grows steadily. Read 7 live chat customer service tips for outstanding customer service in this article.

1. Make sure you are broadly reachable

Research shows that 82% of people think companies should adapt their customer service channels to the customer's wishes. It is therefore important that you are present on the customer's preferred channels. Since you can never take everyone's personal wishes into account, it is important that you use as many channels as possible. When you use customer experience software, you handle all incoming questions from a single clear platform, which means you never have to switch between different websites again. That way you offer the customer better service, but it costs you as a company no extra effort.

2. Reduce waiting times

Having to wait too long for someone to deal with you is customer service irritation number one among Dutch people. In an independent study 28% voted for this as their biggest irritation. It is therefore important that you do something with these live chat tips: always try to reduce waiting times. Make sure you have enough capacity to catch all incoming conversations. An important link in this is implementing a chatbot. When you choose to use a chatbot it catches all conversations automatically. Thanks to smart artificial intelligence the bot learns more and more and soon takes over 80% of conversations completely. A chatbot always responds immediately and therefore removes all waiting time; it also means you do not have to invest money in deploying more staff. Your current staff now focus on more complex questions that the bot passes on.

3. Centralise your chat channels

Live chat customer service tips certainly help your company well, but the most important thing to remember is that the cooperation in your team has to run smoothly. The atmosphere in your team and company is always what you radiate to the outside world, and it is therefore of great importance that you try to remove irritations. Make sure, therefore, that you use programs with which you prevent frustrations. When you easily assign conversations to employees and everyone knows exactly where they stand, everyone can work on calmly. When you bring a chatbot into this process it will also join seamlessly with your human staff. It answers as many questions as possible and passes conversations on when that is needed.

4. Offer consistent service

It is very important that wherever and whenever customers come into contact with your company, they experience the same service. So it cannot be that they get completely different help on Tuesday than on Thursday, while different staff may be active on customer service. Make sure, therefore, that your staff are sufficiently trained and keep a clear structure: which answer belongs with which question? A first step for this is bundling your customer contact, which means you no longer have to distinguish between different customer contact channels. Secondly it is good to work with a suggestion bot, which shows your staff during chatting what the desired answer to a question is. Make sure as well that you convey a clear message when inducting your staff.

5. Chat proactively

It is hard to really stand out with your customer service. By now most companies have integrated a chat function and are broadly reachable. To make sure your company stands out it is important to offer just that bit of extra service. Make sure you chat proactively, think along with people and offer more information. An example of proactive service is KLM's chatbot, which sends you ticket information before you have asked for it. That way people are pleasantly surprised by this live chat tip and you save them effort.

6. Use data to improve

Carrying through improvements is very important, but always base this on data. You easily take advice from other companies, but what works for one company need not be a winning formula for another at all. When you use the data from conversations held to adjust how you deploy your staff, for example, that is a far more watertight approach. When you use customer service software you easily request statistics on the number of conversations, for example, their timing and the total conversation duration.

7. Sort conversations with tags

To analyse even more extensively what conversations were about exactly, you add tags. With tags you sort conversations and get a better picture of the frequency of questions. You tag conversations with “complaint” or “corona-related”, for example. When you do this with every incoming conversation, you see it back in an overview. That way you know where extra attention has to be paid within your company, or you get a picture of which matters are still too unclear.

Choose an efficient implementation

Would you like to implement these live chat tips quickly and easily? Then use Watermelon's software. Watermelon bundles all your customer contact into a single clear overview, helps you build and implement chatbots and delivers clear, workable analytics. That way you immediately have a solid basis for implementing the live chat tips from this article and you streamline the cooperation within your customer service teams. Try it yourself and create a free account.