Outstanding customer service is making your customers feel like you understand their needs and their issues. There is another way of letting your customers reach out to you that is faster and more structured than an email exchange and more productive than a phone call.
Online Chat is a nice way to personalize your online exchange and enhance the timeliness of your communications. Bang, bang, bang and I can have my question(s) answered and proceed with my order. That is how fast a live chat session can work.
The cost can be approximately $99 per month per concurrent user. But, the benefits may outweigh the costs for your business. Productivity is one of those benefits. For example a user can typically handle up to 3 chat sessions at a time which is much better than the 1:1 ratio of phone calls.
3 Key Criteria to consider for servicing customers with live chat:
1. Are your users or clients on your website? Your chat sessions would have to originate from your website for this solution to make sense.
2. What kind of inquiries you are receiving now? If the inquiries are quick how-to, when and where type questions you can probably benefit from an online chat service. If the inquiries are detailed how-to, trouble-shooting questions online chat will still work for you but up to 3 sessions at once may be a stretch.
3. Having an ‘operator’ available during ‘regular’ business hours is a base requirement to getting the most out of your online chat service. This option is not ideal for a one-person office with other responsibilities away from the computer.
The little secret and value behind these online chat services is that you can build a knowledge base of ‘prepared’ responses for the user to drop into the chat sessions.
3 Benefits:
1. The true speed of responsiveness
2. Diminished need to type and re-type the same answers
3. With prepared responses you can ensure consistent communication from your company to your customers.
Free online chat services with Yahoo, Gmail and AOL are wildly popular in business settings, especially technology companies. Why? Because, they enable quick and concise communications that allow the users to continue making progress with the task at hand. Yes, chat sessions really do enhance productivity.
Isn’t that what you want your customers, clients, and shoppers to do? Live chat. Is it for you?
Carter McNamara of Authenticity Consulting, LLC, provides organizational development, consultant training and Action Learning services, and is developer of the Free Management Library.