Live Chat Produces the Highest Customer Satisfaction
By Living Better on July 26, 2021
Perhaps it is not surprising that given the various types of online support businesses can offer their customer, live chat far surpasses email, FAQ, voicemail, and text support in popularity. Part of the reason for this is obviously the immediacy of response a customer experiences through chat. Your customers know that email responses will take hours or days. One in five voicemail messages does not get answered at all. Frequently asked questions, even with an “ask the community” or a search feature, often use technical lingo that your customer may not understand. Chat allows the customer and support person to interact so that terminology can be overcome quickly. The wait time between chat responses is measured in seconds rather than hours or days.
Why Choose Chat?
There are a number of reasons a business benefits from using live chat support beyond the fact that your customers simply like it better:
- The top reason is the bottom line. Live chat averages being 50% more cost-effective than voice support.
- Sales conversions increase with live chat. One study indicated that utilizing live chat increased sales by 20%.
- Cross-pollination often results from chat interactions. When customers discuss what they are attempting to accomplish with a chat support person, they also discuss alternatives. Thus, customers often end up purchasing plans or products better suited to their needs.
- Chat helps you get in on the ground floor. Less than 10% of businesses have an online chat function on their websites. Utilizing live chat automatically builds in an advantage for your business over 90% of your competitors.
What Are the Chat Numbers?
Forbes recently reported that chat support approval ratings, already substantially higher than other types of online support, continue to improve. They found that the average duration of a chat thread was about 12 1/2 minutes. Customers achieved the results they were looking for through chat support about 90% of the time. The approval statistics were broken down by industry. Nonprofit organizations, transportation, and healthcare industries all had satisfaction ratings of well over 90%. Other industries, like communications and finance, had satisfaction ratings in the 80th percentile. Chat browsing — that is, allowing the chat support person to manipulate the customer’s real-time browser — achieved almost 90% customer satisfaction.
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What Makes Chat Work So Well?
The best live chat support platforms tend to avoid templates and scripts, allowing the support person to interact spontaneously with the customer. This enhances the connection between your client and your business. Beneath this is the principle that an informal conversation goes a long way toward creating the kind of rapport that builds trust between the customer and the support person. Promptness is a huge part of a successful chat experience. Customers typically are patient enough to wait two minutes for the support person to respond, especially if information. Beyond 120 seconds, however, customers become anxious and begin to feel as they have been forgotten. Thus, when finding an answer to a client’s requests takes more than two minutes, it is wise for the support person to give an interim poke to assure the customer that work is ongoing.
Why Is Live Chat Better Than a Bot
You may not know that some chat support functions incorporate a bot — called a “chatbot” — rather than a live support person. In these cases, the bot has been programmed with a set of standard responses. A high percentage of these threads actually meet the consumer’s needs and, if something goes awry, a person is typically standing by to take over the chat. As effective as artificial intelligence seems to be in these instances, a live support person will always be superior to a chatbot. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, customers click on chat support because there were questions they could not find answers to on the company’s website. Since chatbots are programmed with the same data that is on the site, they must be programmed to be flexible enough to grasp what a confused customer is asking. By definition, human beings understand one another better than bots understand them. Second, bots do not grasp emotions. What is more infuriating than trying to interact with a computerized script that is incapable of feeling your frustration? In those situations, you will take it out on the business rather than the bot.
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