Live chat has emerged as one of the most powerful tools for providing an exceptional customer service. However, just putting up a live chat feature on your website is not enough, you need to do much more than this. Here’s how you can make it far more effective and add to its power so as to make your customers happy like never before.

Chat surveys:

Both pre-chat and post-chat surveys can help enhance the quality of your customer service. Customers may have a number of queries and these queries may be related to different departments. Pre-chat surveys can help visitors save time by prompting them to select the required department before submitting a chat request. These surveys also help gather valuable customer information that enables agents and operators to retrieve client records or follow-up in a more efficacious manner. Similarly, post-chat surveys, enable you to gather valuable feedback from your visitors after a live chat session is over.

Be available 24×7:

Live chat is meant to eliminate the queue concept in order to provide an instant problem resolution. A live chat feature on your website enables the support agents to handle a few visitors at a time. You just need to make sure that there’s always somebody ready to chat. In the cases where you’re not able to provide 24×7 support, make it a point to mention approximate times of responding in your chat window.

Offer self-service:

This is yet another way of making your live chat feature more effective. Customers today are tech savvy and hardly like to wait so as to get their queries resolved. In fact, they prefer helping themselves than asking for help. So, you can empower them by providing the required information on your site in the form of a knowledge base. This will provide valuable troubleshooting information for common issues so that the customers have an enhanced experience with you.

Train your agents:

This is no brainer! But here we are not just talking about providing the knowledge of the product and service. Your training should include much more than this. Consider polishing the writing skills of your agents and training them agents about how to communicate with the customer over chat. It ensures that your live chat agents are able to convey the message in a proper, concise and professional manner.

Leverage proactive chat invitations:

Ever wondered what’s more effective than a timely problem resolution? Well, it is knowing your customer’s problems even before they occur and being ready with all possible solutions. Proactive invitations allow you to reach out to the visitors who may be unaware of the live chat service on your website. You can actually provide assistance to your customers even before they ask for it with the help of these chat invitations.