Support chat: improve your customer service wherever you are!
Customer support can make or break the relationship with your customers. More and more different options are emerging that allow customers and leads to get in touch with your company more easily, faster and personally. Want to know how you can get started with this as a company? Here we tell you more about the advantages of these online tools and give you tips on how to improve your customer service.
Connect quickly with live chat
In addition to e-mail and phone calls, more and more companies are using live chat. With live chat, your users can send a message quickly, without spending a long time on the phone or waiting for days to get a reply to their email. Besides speed, live chat brings several other benefits. Below, we list all the benefits of live chat.
Speed
As we have said earlier in our blogs, online speed is incredibly important. People expect more and more, have less and less attention and want to be helped quickly and find the answer to their question. This also applies to customer service. For example, 75% of customers already find it takes too long to speak to a person when they call a company's customer service1. Sending e-mails is also often a time-consuming chore. After you send an email as a customer, you can wait for a long time for a reply and often after one email, the question is still not fully answered.
With live chat, your customers can easily send a message while they are on your website. Because a chat often looks the same as familiar messaging apps, users quickly get used to the environment and can easily send a short message. As a business, because you can process several chats side by side, your customers get their questions answered faster and don't have to queue on the phone. Speed immediately brings two other benefits: improved customer relations and cost savings.
Improved online experience
Speed is therefore incredibly important. In fact, a Forrester study shows that 57% of customers leave a website and possible purchase if they cannot find quick answers to their questions2. If you can offer this to your customers, they will have better associations with your brand.
In addition, the vast majority of customers also find chat a lot nicer to work with and are more satisfied with it. 73% are satisfied with chat, compared to 61% with mail and only 44% with phone3. So to keep your customers happy, respond to their needs and convert them faster, live chat is indispensable in your customer service.
Costs
Costs are also reduced by using live chat if you compare it to calling. Both in its use and staff costs. Because live chat is much faster than calling, and your staff can handle multiple chats simultaneously, more questions are answered per hour. As a result, you need fewer staff for live chat than if if if will go via phone.
In addition, live chat also delivers a lot more. Live chat can offer 3-5 times more conversions and has an ROI of 6000%3.
Improve your service with Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence, or Artificial Intelligence, is increasingly being applied in customer service. In fact, Gartner expects that by 2020, 85% of relationship management will go without talking to a person4. As such, chatbots and virtual assistants are constantly expanding, offering better and more natural answers. These days, answers do not have to consist of text only, but can also show images, videos, links and booking buttons. The biggest benefits of incorporating AI into your customer service are: speed, improved customer relations and cost-saving.
Speed
Speed is incredibly important when it comes to getting an answer to your question. Chatbots are a lot faster than humans, can store extensive data, teach themselves more things and can multitask.
Every time a human interacts with a chatbot, the chatbot can store this information. Through machine learning, the chatbot can teach itself this information and use it again for the next time. This gives the chatbot an incredibly extensive database of information, which it works its way through in seconds to find the right answer. Researching for the right answer thus already takes a lot less time than when a human goes looking for the answer.
In addition, chatbots do not need to go to sleep. This allows you as a company to offer your customers 24/7 support, without your customers leaving for another site to get an answer to their question. This is especially ideal if you need to help customers all over the world in different time zones. As a result, you'll never miss a customer again!
Personalisation
Because the chatbot has an extensive database, it can recognise customer behaviour and gain better insight here. The result? Tailor-made answers, offers or discounts. Not only in the chat, but also on the pages of your website.
And that is exactly what the online user wants: personalisation. Not only is it important for the user, but also for you as an organisation. In fact, 98% of marketers say personalisation helps improve customer relations5.
That's right.
Costs
Finally, a chatbot is also a lot cheaper than 100% human customer service and is often a one-off investment. For instance, you'll have to get a whole customer service team in first and train them to understand as much as possible about your product, service or brand. Should you also offer many different products or services and therefore have different support departments, you will need even more people to be inducted.
As soon as the people are inducted, they unfortunately still cannot match the knowledge a chatbot can collect and store. In addition, new information can be added easily and you never have to worry that your chatbot will quit.
Aside from that, you never have to worry that your chatbot will quit.
Aside from costing less for the chatbot, it can also help your 'real' employees settle in or help provide better answers that connect with the customer. Because the chatbot all gathers insights about customers, they can predict what the customer needs and which answer is best given to a particular question.
Deploying chatbots, of course, does not mean that humans in customer support are no longer needed. The useful thing about chatbots is that they can take over tasks from your service desk, allowing people to focus on more important and big tasks related to a customer specifically.
Messaging apps
So using live chat and artificial intelligence in your customer service is super convenient and cost-saving. Also, nowadays you don't need developers to set up a chatbot for your business. There are several software that offer chatbots and different messaging platforms offer solutions for companies to easily connect with their target audience and better connect their support to wherever the target audience is. Good examples are the popular platforms Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp Business, both of which are used by 1.3 billion people every month6.
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Facebook Messenger
With Messenger, Facebook provides a chat platform where the target audience can quickly and easily get in touch with the company for questions, advice or problems. Within Facebook Messenger, businesses can set up various features. For instance, they can customise the welcome message when users visit their Facebook business page, set different default questions that people can click on, set up a chatbot and even add the Messenger chat to their website.
WhatsApp Business
The well-known messaging platform WhatsApp also introduced WhatsApp Business some time ago. WhatsApp Business allows businesses to create an uncluttered chat for their customers within the platform they use most often7.
Learn more about WhatsApp for Business? We tell you all about it in an earlier blog!
Applications
Now that you know more about chatbots, you also want to know how you can deploy them. Actually, chatbots can be used in an infinite number of ways. For example, restaurants deploy them to take orders quickly. For example, users can re-order a pizza simply by asking which pizza they ordered last time. Restaurants also allow you to easily place a reservation without being helped by a human employee.
Not only restaurants work with reservations, the same goes for hotels where rooms can be booked using a chatbot. The chatbot can also inform people about check-in times, flight times, send the e-ticket to the traveller and even send real-time information about a gate change at the airport. With the Uber chatbot, you can quickly and easily arrange a rental car/taxi via Facebook Messenger, Slack or even Google Maps.
A chatbot could actually be used for any industry. For fitness to recommend specific fitness exercises, within healthcare to provide tips and answers before people contact a doctor's assistant and within the clothing industry to help put together an outfit. AH also helps its users by suggesting dishes based on ingredient, type of dish or type of cuisine.
Do you want to get started with live chat or a chatbot? Then take a good look at which platforms are perfect for your users or use software that allows you to easily get started yourself. The same goes for setting up a chatbot. See where and how a chatbot can be an addition to your customer service and improve your support!