There has never been a better time to invest in digital customer support.
- Customers make fewer trips to offline stores and many businesses invest in online channels to balance the lost revenue.
- Even if customers still prefer one-to-one interactions for questions about your product or services, it’s, unfortunately, one of the most expensive solutions.
- On top of that, customer support agents are limited to only handle one request at a time.
This leads us to the main question:
How can companies capitalize on their digital customer support during corona?
Live chat connects social channels into one messenger.
One part of the problem can be tackled by implementing an online chat on the company’s website, while interconnecting social media like Facebook and Instagram into the chat. This allows customer support agents to handle different queries at the same time. This is just the first step that companies need to take to tackle the number of incoming requests.
Live chat saves you money
You can also combine online chat and other self-service options, such as integrated FAQs inside the chatbot. This will allow the user to stay engaged on the page while answering any questions that might arise. Implementing this can reduce the incoming volumes by 15% to 30%, therefore drastically lowering handling time, cost per contact and time to first contact resolution, across all owned and social channels.
The only trade-off is that you’ll need to invest time and effort into creating a backlog of the most common process, product and support questions. But there’s no doubt that this integration is a solid, long term strategy that will be beneficial as long as your process or product doesn’t change.
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Live chat helps with customer acquisition and onboarding
Another reason to integrate live chat is that online chat is the second most preferred channel for customer support. It positions itself right between phone support and self-service.
Yet, adoption is low among financial service companies. Gartner research shows that only 35% of retail banking, 31% of insurance, and just 9% of wealth and asset management companies offer live chat or a chatbot on their website.
Also, the implementation varies significantly, as shown by this comparison of the top financial service providers using online chat. Across analyzed insurance service companies, Europ Assistance leads the way, having the most customer-centric and effective live chat implementations.
Live chat offers an amazing customer experience
eDigital Customer Service Benchmark survey says, “Live chat had the highest customer satisfaction at 73%, compared to 61% for e-mail support and only 44% for traditional phone support”.
For example, during and outside office hours a chat pop-up is shown in specific steps of the funnel. It requests the minimum information necessary to provide proper support.
When the website visitor previously logged into his or her account, the personal data will already be pre-filled in the CRM, allowing the support agent to know who he/she is talking to. This creates one of the many “wow moments” for your website visitors when they reach out to live chat support agents.
Live chat boosts your customer service team’s productivity
But this is just the beginning. The future of live chat and customer experience is looking very bright. Imagine what could happen when we combine AI, live chat & knowledge management into one. Customer support agents will spend less time searching for answers & will therefore be able to answer more clients.
By using predictive modelling, your support team can be supercharged with AI which feeds the answers at the same time the website visitor is typing their question. By integrating this technology, your support team will be on the cutting edge of providing the fastest customer support possible.
As an agency, we’ve delved deep into the live chat trenches to deliver these custom-made solutions for our clients. Got any questions or don’t know where to start? Take a look at one of our live chat study cases.
Live chat lets your agents build a relationship with the customer
We can also play with features that separate the general incoming requests from the detailed ones. We can add a priority matrix and urgency triggers based on the keywords that are being detection. This will allow you to redirect or escalate some requests to specific people inside the organization while drastically reducing time to first closure.
By using live chat, we reduce the number of incoming requests by using automated Q&A and linking to “Help Section” articles. Specialized departments can create the knowledge FAQs that can be used by the support agents, integrate “Help Section” articles or custom bots that qualify the user’s needs —before eventually escalating to a live representative if necessary.
Here is a list of top enterprise live chat software solutions that we implemented in 2020.
| Brand | Features | Pricing | Business size |
| Intercom | business messenger, live chat, bots, help desk, knowledge base, email automation | €38-153/agent/month (+payments for contacts) | mid-size, enterprise |
| Drift | live chat, chatbot, knowledge base, help desk, email automation, conversational landing pages | €0-1500 / agent / month | mid-size, enterprise |
| Zendesk | help desk, live chat, knowledge base, call center, sales CRM | €0-199 / agent / month | mid-size, enterprise |
| Hubspot | separate help desk with knowledge base, live chat, sales CRM, call center | €0-125 / agent / month | mid-size, enterprise |
| LiveAgent | help desk, live chat, knowledge base, call center | €15-39 / agent / month | small, mid-size |
| LiveChat | live chat with a basic ticketing system | €19-59 / agent / month | small, mid-size |
Livechat Assessment of the Belgian Insurance Industry Landscape.
| Europ Assistance | VAB | Ethias | KBC | AG | AXA | Allianz | Touring | |
| Livechat Integrated? | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| LiveChat In Navigation | X | X | X | – | – | – | – | – |
| Live Chat On Contact Page | X | – | X | – | – | – | – | – |
| Persistent Popup | X | X | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Persistent on Specific Pages | X | X | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Hours Availability Provided | X | – | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Estimated Response Time Listed | X | – | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Legal Discolsure | – | – | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Allows Topic Search | X | – | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Presents Questions & Answers | X | – | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Chatbot Supports Human Escalation | X | – | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Allows Asking Questions | X | X | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Allows Export Transcript | X | X | – | – | – | – | – | – |
Final words
As many companies fail at implementing that personal touch throughout the customer journey, it has never been more important to provide the ability for website visitors and customers to ask just a few simple questions. In doing this you are taking the first steps into making your digital support future-proof.
