Customer support can make or break the relationship you have with your customers. Nowadays, faster and easier methods to let your leads and customers get in personal contact with you are on the rise. Want to know how you can get started with this? We tell you more about the benefits of these online tools and share some tips and tricks on how to improve your customer service.
Faster connection with live chat
Besides email and phone, more companies are starting to use live chat. With live chat, your users can quickly send a message, without having to wait on the phone till an actual person picks it up or waiting for days to get an answer by email finally. Besides being fast, live chat has several other benefits. Below you’ll find all the benefits live chat offers you.
Speed
We’ve already said in our previous blogs, online speed is vital. People expect it more and more while having less attention and want to get their questions answered fast. It’s the same for customer support. Already 75% of all customers say they have to wait too long before they can finally speak to a person when calling the customer service of a company1. Emailing also takes too long. After sending a question via email, you have to wait a long time to get a reply. And even then, your question probably won’t be answered in just one email.
With live chat, customers can easily send a short message while being on your website. Because the chat looks almost the same as known messaging apps, users are used to the chatting environment and will comfortably send a message. The company, on the other hand, can handle multiple chats at the same time, so your customers get answers fast. This way, your customers don’t have to wait in line and won’t lose their patience. Speed brings other benefits to the story, too: improve customer relations and cost-effectiveness.
Improved online experience
You can say speed is pretty important. Forrester research shows 57% of all customers leave a possible purchase when they can’t find their answer quickly enough2. When you can offer this to clients, they will have better associations with your brand.
Besides that, most customers like working with a chat, and they are happier about this type of communication. 73% is satisfied with chat, compared to 61% with email and just 44% with phone3. So live chat is an essential tool in your customer service to keep your customers satisfied, to respond to their needs, and let them convert faster.
Costs
Live chat is also really cost-effective when comparing it to calling, in both the use of it as the labor costs. Because live chat is a lot faster than calling, and your employees can handle multiple chats at the same time, more questions will be answered per hour. So you won’t need as many employees when using live chat instead of or in addition to calling.
Live chat also makes more money. Live chat can offer 3 to 5 times more conversions and has an ROI of 6000%3.
Improve your service with Artificial Intelligence
The use of Artificial Intelligence is seen more and more frequently in customer service. Gartner even expects that in 2020 85% of all customer relations will be done without talking to a person4. Chatbots and virtual assistants get improvements continuously and give more natural answers by this. Besides that, the answers aren’t just textual anymore, images, videos, links, and reservation buttons are common too. The most significant advantages of implementing AI in your customer service are speed, improved customer relations, and cost-effectiveness.
Speed
Speed is crucial when searching for an answer to your question. Chatbots are a lot faster than people, they can save a massive amount of information, understand more with machine learning, and they can multitask.
Every time a human communicates with a chatbot, a chatbot can save this information. This information can be used to get to know more about human interaction and use these insights for the next time. The chatbot has an extensive database full of information, where it can find the right answer in just a few seconds. Researching getting the correct answer takes less time than when a human does it.
Another benefit is that chatbots don’t have to go to sleep. Now your company can offer 24/7 support without having your customers going to another website to find the answer to their questions. This is even more perfect when having customers all around the world in different time zones. Now you’ll never have clients leaving you!
Personalize
A chatbot has an extensive database, and it can recognize the behavior of customers and get insights from these. The results? Tailor-made answers, offerings, and discounts. Not only in chat, but on your website pages too.
And that’s what the online user wants: personalization. Not only is it essential for the user, but you, as an organization, also want to offer personalization. This is because it can improve your customer relations, according to 98% of all marketers5.
Costs
Finally, a chatbot is a lot cheaper than human customer service, and it’s only a one-time investment. When having only humans in your service team, you have to train them all to get to know as much of your product, service, or brand as possible. When you have multiple products or services to offer, and by that, you have numerous service departments, then you have to train even more people.
When your service team is finally trained enough, they still can’t match the enormous amount of information a chatbot can collect and save. Besides that, you can easily add information and you never have to be afraid a chatbot is going to quit.
Besides being less expensive, a chatbot can also train your ‘real’ employees or help them give the right answer to the customer. Because a chatbot collects all kinds of insights about your customers, they can predict the needs of them and show which answer fits these needs perfectly.
Using chatbots doesn’t mean that humans aren’t necessary anymore. The clever thing about chatbot is that they can take over certain tasks, so humans can focus on important, bigger tasks focused on a certain client.
Messaging apps
So using live chat and Artificial Intelligence in your customer service is really handy and cost-effective. You don’t even need developers to start working with a chatbot, nowadays. There is software available to use a chatbot, and messaging apps offer the possibility for companies to get in contact with their target group easily and offer them the support they need. Good examples of these are the popular platforms Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp Business. Both are being used by 1.3 billion people every month6.
Facebook Messenger
With Messenger, Facebook offers a chat platform which its users can use to get in contact with a company easily. Within Facebook Messenger, companies can set up several functionalities. They can set up a welcome message when users visit their Facebook company page, set up several standard questions their users can easily click on, set up a chatbot, and even add the Messenger chat to their website.
WhatsApp Business
Also the popular messaging platform WhatsApp has introduced WhatsApp Business. With WhatsApp Business companies can offer support within the platform that’s most used by their customers7. Want to know more about WhatsApp for Business? In an earlier blog we wrote all about it!
Applications
Now you know more about chatbots, you probably want to know where you can use them for. Chatbots can be used in an endless amount of different ways. Restaurants use them to easily take orders of their customers. Their customers can choose to go for a re-order of their previous pizza, by simply typing ‘re-order’ and choose the right pizza for them. You can also easily make reservations, without being helped by a human employee.
Not only restaurants work with reservations, but you can also do reservations using a chatbot as a hotel. A chatbot can also keep your customers updated on check-in time, flight times, send an e-ticket, and even send travelers information about a gate change on the airport. Uber uses a chatbot to let their customers easily book a car via Facebook Messenger, Slack, and even via Google Maps.
A chatbot can actually be used in any industry. In fitness to advise on certain exercises, within healthcare to give tips and answers to questions, before their clients call the doctor, and within the clothing industry to help set up an outfit. Dutch supermarket AH helps its customers find food inspiration based on an ingredient, type of dish, or type of kitchen.
Want to get started with live chat or with a chatbot? Find out which platforms your target group uses, or find out which chat software suits your needs. When wanting to start using a chatbot, think of where a chatbot can be an addition in your customer support and improve it!
