What is Live Chat Software?

Introduction

Live chat is a messaging solution that your website visitors and prospective customers can use to communicate with your support agents in real time. Similar to phone and email, it is one of the communication channels commonly deployed to provide customer support.

Live chat combines the best aspects of phone and email. Your customers can engage in effective two-way communication in real time with your sales, support and other agents to get their queries and issues resolved quickly and efficiently.

Features of Live Chat Software

Lead Capture

The live chat tool should be non-intrusive on your website, yet available instantly to welcome visitors and provide them assistance. In addition, the software captures lead info and automates it to your CRM platform so that your sales reps can nurture promising prospects.

Modern live chat applications do this by generating triggered messages based on event and user properties, using interactive chatbots at the appropriate time, and sending in-platform contextual campaigns. Your marketing and sales team can act on the leads to close more deals.

Familiar Chat Experience

The live chat program should be easy to use for your customers. It should facilitate instant, contextual, and continuous conversations similar to everyday life. Plus, it should enable your visitors to quickly reach the right agents with their queries.

For your business, the platform should enable your support and sales teams to view all conversations in a single dashboard so that they can prioritize replies and work efficiently. The user interface should be easy to manage to assist your teams to effortlessly engage in friendly and natural conversations with your customers.

Self-service Tools

The software should enable your visitors to find information on their own. It should offer help videos, tutorials, self-help guides, and FAQs that your customers can access easily to find fast answers to their issues. Top live chat software solutions like Freshchat enable companies to create FAQ content in numerous global languages for their worldwide customer base. Plus, the program allows users to provide their feedback on the FAQ articles which businesses can use to improve the content.

Team Collaboration

The live chat system should make your support and sales teams more collaborative and productive in performing their daily tasks. The team members should be able to attach notes, tag team members, prioritize threads, categorize conversations, and more. Leading solutions offer automated, rules-based task routing functionality that permits you to route queries to the right agents based on their expertise or workload. This allows agents to perform at their best in delivering engaging customer experiences.

Analytics and Reports

The live chat software should generate and measure metrics for optimization and improvement. It should offer helpful data points and insights that empower decision makers to identify and analyze the plus and minus points of their live chat processes.

The application should produce support performance metrics such as customer satisfaction rating and first response time, and deliver visual insight on the chat processes. Plus, it should deliver data on historical metrics, conversation trends, real-time chat volume, and more that your business teams can utilize to learn and improve their performance.

Benefits of Live Chat Software

Convenient for Customers

Live chat software enables your visitors and customers to contact your support agents on your website without needing to leave it to find assistance somewhere else. You can communicate with your visitors anywhere they may be browsing on your site. This helps to resolve their concerns instantly and boost their confidence to do business with your company.  

Reduces Costs

A live chat platform can reduce your phone support costs as well as employee task time. It lowers overall support costs by slashing average interaction expenses. Plus, it improves efficiency as your agents can simultaneously manage multiple chats, which eliminates the need to recruit more workers. This multi-tasking helps your support team to reduce the waiting queue more effectively compared to a call center.

Preferred Support Channel

In a Forrester study, 44% of online consumers preferred live chat over other support channels for its convenience and speed. Customers can get immediate access to support with an online chat tool. In addition, wait time is much less than on phone, and customers can do other tasks while waiting.

Proactive Engagement

Your site visitors can click on the chat button to start a conversation any time, however, top live chat platforms also allow your support reps to initiate the contact. They can send chat requests automatically or manually based on defined rules. This proactive chat engagement helps your visitors find the info they need faster and converts more browsers into purchasers.

E-Commerce CRM Integration

Finally, sophisticated live chat solutions integrate with your e-commerce CRM system which allows your agents to view your customers’ profile during chatting. This is a beneficial feature that can assist you to make smarter business decisions. For example, you can deliver priority support to your valuable customers and provide them a convenient shopping experience on your online store.