Businesses today are more competitive than ever before and are constantly vying for the maximum customer mindshare. In such a customer-centric world, customer service can be a game-changer for your company. According to Forbes, of almost 1,000 consumers polled, 92% say they would stop purchasing from a company after three or fewer poor customer service experiences. 26% of those would stop after just one bad experience! Clearly, customer service cannot be ignored.
Table of Contents
- What do customers want?
- How to deliver exceptional customer service – Live chat to the rescue!
- Delight customers with Hiver Chat
- What makes Hiver Chat unique?
- Achieve improved business outcomes with Hiver Chat
- Take a quick look at Hiver’s Live chat capabilities
- Redefine customer service with Live chat
What do customers want?
In order to get the customer service strategy right, it is important to answer one question. What do customers expect? The answer is extremely simple, but equally difficult to get right – a great experience. An outstanding customer service experience goes a long way toward fostering strong customer relations, improving customer engagement, and attracting more customers.
Here’s a comprehensive view of what constitutes a great customer service experience.
- Personalization – Whenever customers reach out to a company for support, they want every experience to be friendly and tailored to their requirements. Companies are increasingly expected to understand their customers’ intent and deliver personalized, contextualized and meaningful service.
- Speed – A common expectation of customers is that they should get instant responses to their questions whenever they contact customer support. The speed of response is as important as the quality of response.
- Consistency – Conflicting responses from different agents to the same questions do not reflect well on a company’s brand and can cause customers to lose confidence in the products/services offered by the company. Hence, it is imperative for companies to maintain consistency in the quality of their customer service.
- Convenience – Customers today are extremely busy, juggling multiple things at once. They demand seamless, multichannel experiences which enable them to continue multitasking even as they connect with the support teams.
- Contextualization – Whenever customers have any queries/complaints, one thing that they hate is having to repeat and re-share their issue with multiple customer service agents every time they visit the website. Businesses should work towards contextualizing customer service conversations based on their prior interactions with support teams.
How to deliver exceptional customer service – Live chat to the rescue!
As businesses strive to identify the right mix of technology and design that provides the most satisfactory customer service, it is worthwhile to understand what customers really expect a good customer service experience to be. 79% of customers now prefer live chat as it provides them instant access to support.
Live chat is a messaging platform that lets existing and potential customers talk to your company in real-time via your website or mobile app. It gives customers more confidence in doing business with companies by making customer support easy, hassle-free and instantaneous. Nearly 73% of customers find live chat to be the most satisfying way of communicating with a business. Ultimately, live chat helps companies forge more personal, direct and longstanding relationships with customers. Therefore, it would be no exaggeration to say that ignoring live chat on your website can be a surefire way to lose business.
Here are some key business areas where companies see significantly improved metrics post implementing live chat for customer support:
- Customer loyalty – 63% of customers are more likely to return to a company that has a live chat on its website.
- Sales per customer – While reviewing customer sales patterns, it was observed that customers who engage in chat spend 60% more per purchase compared to customers who do not engage in chat.
- Conversion rates – Since visitors tend to have higher confidence in companies that provide live-chat support, the addition of live chat to a website enables an 8-20% increase in conversion rates.
- Lead generation – 42% of customers cite live chat as the preferred channel for providing their contact information, higher than any other lead generation mode.
Delight customers with Hiver Chat
At Hiver, we are constantly striving towards enabling customer excellence through our simple yet powerful product features, which not only ensure high customer satisfaction but also create an outstanding experience for customer service agents – the true warriors behind successful customer service. And so, here we are with Hiver Chat, Hiver’s live chat feature, which will enable businesses to deliver personalized customer service, in real-time.
What makes Hiver Chat unique?
- Works on a Unified Interface – Hiver Chat is integrated with Gmail so agents can respond to incoming customer chats right from the comfort of their email – both on desktop and on mobile, without ever having to switch to any alien interface.
- Easy to Use – Setup, design, modify and launch Hiver Chat on your website in just a few simple steps without relying on any external support.
Achieve improved business outcomes with Hiver Chat
- Enhance customer service – Empower your teams to provide more personalized, multichannel and contextual support to their customers.
- Enable faster responses – Provide prompt chat support while also notifying support teams of any missed chats, so that corrective actions can be taken ASAP.
- Boost conversion rates – Convert more website visitors to happy customers by proactively anticipating and addressing their queries through real-time chat support.
Take a quick look at Hiver’s Live chat capabilities
1. Email capture & Transcripts
Live chat is arguably one of the most successful modes for email capture. It can help generate more and better quality leads which will eventually help your business drive more focused marketing, boost sales, and develop better relationships with existing/prospective customers.
- Use Email Capture to collect first-time visitors’ contact information. This can help you reach out to them for a campaign later or to follow up with them in case they can dropped off from a chat.
- Send transcripts of the chat to customers/visitors as text records of conversations or to cross-functional teams for better collaboration on customer queries. This can be sent either as an automated email when the chat is closed or can be manually triggered by users.
- Visitor transcripts mandate you to add a ‘reply-to’ email address. This is super useful if the visitor replies to the transcript in future for another query, your team handling the reply-to email can easily continue the conversation over email.
2. Chat Contextualization
Get a comprehensive context of customer requirements based on previous chats initiated by any visitor and help support teams contextualize the conversation accordingly, thereby providing a more personalized customer experience.
3. Unavailability
Manage customer expectations better by providing transparency into support teams’ availability.
- Allow support agents to update their availability for live chat support.
- Let your website visitors know that all agents are unavailable and instead they can send their queries to an alternative channel like email.
4. Missed Chats
Oftentimes, customer chats slip through the cracks as agents are not able to respond in real-time. Missed Chat alerts help teams identify and respond timely to such chats while at the same time enabling customers to reach out to customer support through alternate channels.
- Teams can define SLAs for chat responses, to ensure prompt customer service.
- Team admins can opt to receive email alerts whenever chats are not answered within the defined timelines so that they can take corrective actions.
- If multiple chats are missed consecutively, you can enable the system to take the chat widget offline and notify relevant people so that there are no further missed chats.
5. Chat Templates
Deliver a unified customer experience while enabling support agents to save time and effort in drafting responses to common questions asked by customers.
- Create ready-to-use chat templates.
- Use and edit templates for replying to customers faster and efficiently.
6. Mobile app
Enable support agents to view and respond to customer chats even when they are away from their desktops. Push notifications for new chats, chats assigned to you and new messages on the mobile app will help ensure that no customer is left waiting.
Redefine customer service with Live chat
As businesses continue to evolve, their success will directly depend on whether they can create the best customer experience, at the right time and in the right place. Live chat is one of the key enablers for businesses to deliver consistently great customer experiences at scale.
Explore Hiver Chat and discover how you can delight your customers with personalized, 24×7 live chat support, right from the comfort of your Gmail.
