Tethr and Awaken Intelligence join forces as Creovai
Tethr and Awaken Intelligence are becoming Creovai, bringing together best-in-class conversation analytics and real-time agent assistance.
Robert Beasley
June 3, 2024
Madeline Jacobson
July 17, 2024
Offering chat support can reduce operational costs and resolve customer concerns faster. Research also indicates many customers, especially younger ones, prefer to try online chat customer support before they reach out over the phone.
Sounds pretty good, right? But creating a successful chat support experience for your customers requires more than just implementing a chatbot on your website and stepping back. You need to factor in common pitfalls, such as chatbot confusion, silos between support channels, and limited live chat hours, and come up with a plan to address them. Otherwise, you risk creating friction and frustrating your customers.
Don’t risk driving customers away with a poor chat support experience. Below, we’re sharing five best practices to help you set up a chat support program that reduces friction for your customers and agents.
Live chat tools offer your website visitors a way to directly connect with your customer service team via real-time messaging. Customers talk to a real person, but unlike phone support, customer service agents can talk to several customers at once and give them individual attention.
Chatbots mimic the activity of talking to a real person but are actually just conversational interface tools. Chatbots can answer common questions, refer customers to knowledge base articles, or refer them to the correct section of your website.
For both, businesses often use custom chat widgets, use chat systems through CMS providers such as Salesforce, or offer it through messaging platforms such as Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger.
So if your business wants to implement chat support, should you start with live chat or a chatbot?
It may make sense to implement both. One mistake you should avoid is implementing a chatbot and making it difficult for customers to speak to a human.
Chatbots can be useful for handling frequently asked questions or straightforward requests, such as resetting a password, but they may be unable to answer more complex questions–especially if the chatbot hasn’t been trained to recognize the specific phrasing a customer uses. While generative AI chatbots–which are trained on large language models to provide personalized, highly relevant responses–are an exciting development, they still come with significant risks, including the possibility of sharing inaccurate information.
While you may want to steer your customer to digital channels first, you still need to include an option for customers with more complex issues, whether that's live chat, phone calls, or case management. And you need to make it easy for customers to get help through those channels.
“If customers have to go on a hide-and-seek mission to find contact information, it’s really frustrating,” says Shep Hyken, CX keynote speaker and best-selling author. “Let’s take a lesson from Zappos. Each page of their site includes a phone number you can call. They’re an online shoe company that wants you to transact online, but they make it easy to contact them if you need additional support.”
The point of live chat, as opposed to a phone call or email support, is for your customers to access help immediately. 80% of chats are answered within the first 40 seconds, according to research shared by Call Centre Helper. The longer you make your customers wait for a response, the more likely they are to get frustrated, pick up the phone, or abandon the interaction (and potentially your business).
Make sure that your chat is set up to provide immediate support. This might involve using a chatbot that greets the customer, gets more information about what they need, and then directs them to the best live chat agent or other resources. You can also make it clear on your website when your live support is available, so your customers know when they can expect to receive a response from your support team.
73% of customers say valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good customer service. Know what makes customers feel like their time isn’t valued? Asking them to repeat information they’ve already shared in another support channel.
If you force your customers to describe the issue they’re trying to a chatbot, only to ask them to repeat the information once they escalate to live chat or phone support, it can make a bad situation worse.
You can eliminate repeated information requests by integrating your support channels, CRM, and real-time agent guidance platform. This allows you to simplify your live agents’ workflows and brings the customer data they need into a single interface, ensuring they don’t waste time searching for information or asking the customer to repeat themselves.
If you’re offering chat as a method for customers to interact with you, you need to measure your success. This should go beyond a basic question such as “Did I resolve your problem today?” or a post-interaction survey. These chats offer insights that can improve your customer experience and guide you toward business improvements.
Skipping chat analysis threatens your customer service experience, since resolution rates or use of the live chat software alone won’t tell you all you need to know about customer satisfaction.
You don’t have to manually sift through every chat interaction to extract valuable insights. Conversation intelligence software like Tethr (a Creovai company) uses AI to identify and categorize key moments, topics, and behaviors in voice and digital conversations. This lets you identify trends and answer questions such as:
Conversation intelligence software gives you a comprehensive understanding of your chat interactions without requiring a post-interaction survey–allowing you to optimize your chat experience.
A conversation intelligence platform can also help you improve your chatbot’s performance using data from phone and live chat interactions. A good place to start is by looking at all chatbot conversations that were escalated to a live agent and running a report to identify the top issues by volume. From there, you can look at the records of live support interactions that successfully addressed those issues. Look for language in these successful interactions that you can use to train your chatbot, enabling it to address issues that it previously had to escalate.
This approach offers a big payoff. For example, one of our customers, TwinStar Credit Union, reduced its chatbot’s unsure rate by 75% by training it on conversation data, improving their self-service experience and freeing live agents up to focus on more complex issues.
Chat support gives customers a low-effort way to resolve issues–when done well. However, if your company makes common chat support mistakes, such as making it challenging for customers to switch to a live support channel, failing to set realistic expectations for response times, or failing to sync customer data across channels, you’ll ultimately set your customers up for a frustrating experience. To avoid these pitfalls, it’s essential to develop a strategy for integrated omnichannel support–and use conversation intelligence to identify opportunities for improvement. Get your chat support right and your business will earn a reputation for delivering excellent customer service.
This blog was originally published in July 2022 under the title “5 mistakes companies make with chat support.” It was most recently expanded and updated with new information in July 2024.
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