In a recent American Express study, consumers ranted how crappy customer service in the web is. This includes, but is not limited to, live chat support. Negative sentiments consumers have about customer support is causing businesses to lose some serious bucks.

Take a closer look at the numbers below:

80% - admit they have quit midway to completing a transaction because of lousy service

89% - admit they move to a competitor after experiencing bad customer service

Consumers have become very sensitive about the customer service experience they get and they have two knee-jerk reactions when dealt with crappy live support: they quit and they go to the next guy who can do better.

It’s time to get serious about ending crappy customer support. If you’re smart, knowing these consumers’ knee-jerk reactions to bad customer service alone will make you realize excellent customer care through live chat support not only retain customers but also attract new ones.

So if right now your customer care quality is less than stellar, here are 5 ways you can end a crappy live chat support without breaking the bank:

Improve your speed

Online shoppers expect to be connected instantly with a live chat agent when they use chat. They also expect agents to respond quickly. Notification alerts play a crucial role in getting an agent’s attention every time a new chat message comes in so that a customer on the other line will not be disappointed. Loud sound alerts and tab notifications are extremely helpful. Make use of Offerchat live chat tool’s IM integration feature if you prefer to have a dedicated program handle chats, separate chat from browsing, and get more conspicuous notification alerts.

Be smarter, show initiative

Live chat features that allow you to be smarter are: the pre-chat form, transfer, and chat history.

The pre-chat form feature allows you to gather information about a customer or site visitor before a chat conversation starts. Make sure you or your live chat agents read what customers log into the pre-chat form.

Most live chat tools, including Offerchat, have a “transfer” feature. When transferring a customer to another agent who can assist him/her better, be sure to brief the agent what the customer wants along with other important details. By doing this, customers won’t have to repeat themselves over again and frustrations are thwarted.

Agents receiving the transfer should read the previous chat logs to get a clear view of what’s going on. Customers will appreciate your asking for a few seconds to skim through the history of the previous conversation than asking them to fill you in. Having customers repeat themselves is a surefire rant starter.

Use saved responses responsibly

Saved responses are of great help to agents but over-reliance on them can be disastrous. As a professional handling live chat customer service, understand that not all customer scenarios are covered in the canned responses. Don’t be lazy to type out a sincere response. And always remember to be clear and concise while you’re at it.

Brief the team on the company’s brand and voice

As the manager or the owner, take the responsibility to orient your team with the company’s brand and voice. Having this exercise puts everyone on board in the same page. Online consumers love consistency; they can get easily confused by mixed messages and generally put off with robotic, dull interactions.

Conduct regular live chat training and mentoring sessions

Most people underestimate live chat thinking they could just hire someone with “superb typing skills” and live happily ever after. It’s a concept that’s greatly flawed in so many ways. Understand that live online chat is a unique form of communication quite different from phone and email. Successfully providing online customers with a satisfying live chat experience lies in the agents’ ability to manage the chat conversation in an efficient and effective way.

Business owners and managers should understand that conducting regular training as well as mentoring and coaching sessions will inculcate skill sets such as asking the right questions and in the right manner. These will define how a consumer perceives the quality of live chat customer service you provide. Part of the advantages of outsourcing live chat agents is the fact that these agent training sessions and quality coaching are done by the outsourcing company making it very convenient for most business owners.

Over to YOU..

What are the live chat support difficulties you’re presently hurdling? How are you overcoming these hurdles?

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Monitoring and measuring certain aspects of your online business and marketing are essential to determine the success of your ecommerce initiatives or if you’re able to meet company goals. If you have a live chat widget added to your website or ecommerce store as a touch point and customer service tool, monitoring and measuring the quality of your live chat customer service and capturing accurately the customer service experience on your live chat investment is now possible by enabling the Post Chat Survey from the Offerchat dashboard.

What is a Post Chat Survey?
A post chat survey is a dialog box that will appear to your website visitors and customers who have just finished a live support chat session with you or one of your customer service staff (live chat agent). It allows website visitors and customers to rate the live online chat they’ve just experience and allows them to put their comments regarding the person they have chatted with and the live chat customer service experience as a whole.

How to Activate the Post Chat Survey

Important: Activating the post chat survey from the dashboard needs administrator/account owner access. To enter the Offerchat dashboard and make crucial changes, log in with your email address and password for your Offerchat account. Once inside the dashboard, follow the steps below:

Step 1
Click a website under your profile. Choose the website where you’d want to have the Post Chat Survey activated.

Step 2
Go to Widget Settings

Step 3
Click the Post Chat Survey tab at the top.

Step 4
Click the Enabled button to activate the post chat survey to appear after every chat conversation ends.

The Post Chat Survey is now activated!

A preview of the dialog box for the Post Chat Survey is displayed in the screen. The color of the box reflects the color of the live chat widget on your website. This will be the Post Chat Survey box your customers will see at the culmination of each chat session. From here on, you’ll be able to gauge customers experience and also gauge your customer service staff’s performance. You’ll see a collated report on this from the Offerchat dashboard.

If you need additional help in activating the post chat survey on your Offerchat live chat widget, or if you have questions with anything, come chat with us at the Offerchat homepage or send us a message using the Feedback button from the dashboard.

 

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“Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.”

- Bobby Unser

There is one very nifty live chat feature you can activate in the live chat widget on your website that bears the potential of making each chat session a successful live chat customer support feat - the pre chat form.

The pre chat form is a very brief form consisting of three fields max. Once activated, a site visitor would need to fill out the pre chat form before initiating a live chat with an agent through the widget on your website. Two fields, name and email address, are automatically displayed by default once the pre chat form is activated. The third field, which is the message/question field, is optional and will be included only if you choose and configure it from the dashboard.

How to configure the Pre Chat Form

Note: Administrator access is needed when activating the pre chat form. Thus, the account owner or an admin has to login to the Offerchat dashboard to configure it.

Prerequisite steps: To activate the pre chat form, login to the Offerchat dashboard or client chat panel using the registered email address and password. Once inside the dashboard, select a website on your left where you want to activate the Pre Chat form. A dropdown of additional options should appear.

1. Go to Widget Settings.
2. Click Pre Chat Form from the options at the top.
3. Click Enable to activate the pre chat form on the live chat widget on your site.
4. Tick the box to require users to enter a message or question before starting the chat if you want to. (optional)

I’m sure you’ll thank your lucky stars in the future for activating the pre chat form in the Offerchat live chat customer support widget on your site. The two default fields, the name and email address, are not only means to generate leads but also a convenient information of the necessary contact details if you need to get back to a customer disconnected from the chat session for some unexpected circumstances.

Therefore, not only can you make sales but also save sales. But the best part is winning customer loyalty to your brand because you took the extra mile of restarting a conversation when other companies will just have dropped.

 

 

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Shopify store owners are tremendously raking in unprecedented earnings. Through the internet, entrepreneurs can market their products worldwide. If you’re an avid online merchant, producer of novel goods, expert artisan of any industry, or somebody with products to showcase and sell online, one of the most popular showrooms in the internet is Shopify - a web-based e-commerce platform that allows businesses to create an online store.

Just with any type of business, excellent customer service is imperative in a Shopify e-commerce site to gain the most sales. If you’re Shopify store is experiencing humdrum sales & conversions for some time now, you might be committing these 3 customer service blunders without knowing it.

Duplicating Web Presence for Mobile

Do you have mobile offerings to attract buyers? The similarity they have with your social media marketing campaigns and even on your Shopify store determines the success rate of conversions and sales.

While in the past, the experience and value offered to consumers tend to be the same across all platforms – Shopify store, social media pages, mobile apps or pages – more and more business owners are uncovering the fact that altering the value a customer gets in one platform and making the offerings unique from its web presence (website and social media pages), get them more raves and, consequently, more sales. So don’t duplicate your web presence in your mobile offerings. Add an additional perk for consumers who found you through mobile or are using mobile to purchase goods and create a whole new customer experience for them.

Yes, you can definitely do this whilst still being consistent across all marketing platforms you’ve chosen. Consistency and uniformity (tedious lack of variety), after all, are two different things. Think gamification and make your mobile offering more fun.

Having Multiple Customer Service Channels

Having a multi-channel customer support wasn’t considered bad – not until they’ve turned into communication silos that are isolated and closed, completely disconnected from each other.

Maybe you’ve seen it lots of times: a customer tweets to a brand for assistance, posts a message on its Facebook page, emails with details about the purchase, and, after getting no response just decided to call the customer support number only to repeat the details why he/she needs assistance all over again. Yes, it’s frustrating and definitely a huge dent in customer experience.

Customers are increasingly expecting support to be agile rather than be multi-channeled. They expect being able to start interaction in one touchpoint and still be able to complete it in another in the name of convenience. This calls for smarter strategies with a standardized resolution process, efficient retrieval and use of data given by the customer, and consistency throughout all customer service channels.

The new mantra is: Less is More.

Lack of an Easy Customer Support Channel

Everybody loves convenience. It’s one of the steadfast pillars of customer experience.

Everything you’ve done in your Shopify store – the theme, the layout, the design, the presentation of product photos, writing of product descriptions, discounts and promos – all have one goal in mind: to make your Shopify ecommerce site provide the best customer experience possible. It’s not even just to sell anymore!

Convenience is closely tied with customer experience. By making your customers’ lives easier while they’re on your Shopify store, you’re winning them over to your side. Checkout optimization, alternative payments, product detail page enhancements , and most especially, easy access to customer service as just some of the areas businesses are making improvements on.

Does a customer need to find a “Contact us” link to fill out a form for an inquiry? Does he or she have to set a time to make a call to ask assistance? Or exit out your Shopify store just to tweet you if the item is available in mauve? Why not add a live chat widget so they can directly contact you and get the help they needed right away without leaving the page they’re currently in? They might just be on the checkout page. You wouldn’t want them closing that page just to answer their “quick question”.

 

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“We are all in the service business.” - Sumair Dutta

The past year, 2012, has seen the exploding proliferation in social media use including using social media as a customer support channel. As an offshoot of 2012 as year of social media, 2013 will be the year when customer service goes mainstream ... and live chat will have a very significant role in this. This is the year when businesses will fight it out ferociously in this field as competition boils down to who can provide the best customer service support to consumers.

Read through the customer service trends of 2013 and ride the arrow for the win this year.

Deeply Interconnected Channels

2012 was witness to how interconnected the world has become through the eyes of social media. The global population has been bonded together through relations, professions, common interests and even products and services we’ve come to love. In the recent years, even before 2012, new channels for customer communication have been established and greatly used, making it unwise for any business to use a single channel. (Case in point: Businesses have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to allow their customers to reach them aside from the accustomed email and phone support.)

Perhaps the latest customer communications tool to surface that proved to be hugely successful is the live chat tool which allows immediate one-on-one interaction between a brand and a consumer without the latter leaving the former’s website. This “get what you need, when you need it” type of convenience struck customers’ hearts that made live chat the most-loved customer service tool that ultimately prompted huge companies, like BestBuy, to abandon email and use live chat instead in addition to their phone support.

Smarter Consumers, More Personalized Information

The internet and social networks make it easy for consumers to conduct research before a purchase decision. Most online shoppers are educated, with ample household income, which means many of them are professionals. It’s easy for them to acquire and process general types of information. However, due to time constraints, online shoppers will seek “smarter”, more personalized answers to their queries. Search engines are continuously adapting these factors to their algorithms, precisely why social signals are constantly being added to the mix.

What’s an e-commerce store or online business to do? Make access to personalized information be as painless as possible by making activating one-on-one chatting via a live chat widget. Simple inquiries can be answered on the spot without dialling a toll-free number and going through the phone system’s menu.

Rise of Super Agents

Because excellent multi-channel customer support is portended to be the norm this year, businesses will be augmenting customer service training giving rise to superstar agents. Not to say that customer service mediocrity is rampant in the past, it’s just that excellence was spread thinly in all fields as businesses realized that phone support alone cannot handle the bulk of communication demand – the floodgates of which have been opened by digital communication, social media and the internet, in general.

These superstar agents will be next year’s “biggest assets” of any industry as consumers gravitate towards companies who can give a best-in-class service. As Sumair Dutta rightly puts it, “We are all in the service business.”

Crowdsourcing Customer Support

Along with social media, last year, crowdsourcing was also brought to the forefront. 2012 has seen the rise of services such like Foursquare and Yelp which allow customers to rate and review local businesses, products and services they like and stream these activities to their social network accounts that consequently gave small and big brands exposure that led to new discoveries.

This year, crowdsourcing will be one of the core players in the customer service agenda. Think organizational knowledge bases powered by customers themselves, that is, Wikipedia style. The “customer as agent” movement will be increasingly championed, though not blatantly and simplistically. It will make use of real-time content seamlessly flowing to and fro several channels that not only include knowledge bases but also forums, social media, review sites, and even mobile apps.

Home-based Live Chat Agents

The global link has been forged tightly as time passed. The last couple of years have seen tremendous advancements in multi-channel communications and communication devices that gave rise to increased connectivity that went beyond email and instant messaging. Now, people are walking around with a computer in hand. Telecommuting is already seen as a way to do one’s job, when decades ago it was unthinkable. With the economy in murky waters and unemployment rampant, the internet provided a myriad of job opportunities as the world became a small town because of global interconnectivity.

Thus, in 2013, home-based customer service reps will wow the crowd. Live chat customer service will do to what social media did to small brands last year – that is, leveling the playing field in the arena where huge companies and brands were expected to rule. With high-quality training, ample resources and updated practices and information acting as means to satiate every business’s drive for customer service excellence this year, home-based live chat agents will rock this year.

How do you plan excel in customer service this year?

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Rather than force the issue to better its wretched email support, Best Buy ditches email and switches to live chat instead in an attempt to be a superstar in customer service.

On Tuesday, STELLAService noted on its Happy Customer blog that the electronics retail player has eliminated the option for customers to email the company through a contact form in its customer service page and placed in its stead an online chat functionality.

Best Buy concurred that email is “unable to offer the same level of in-the-moment assistance” that a live chat tool can provide customers. This move by Best Buy mirrors the move by an increasing number of businesses that have added a live chat widget on their websites for customers to be able to reach them directly and get the assistance they want, when they need it.

Best Buy was far from dazzling in delivering quality customer service support through email. There’s a bunch of Best Buy email support “fails”, the most popular of which caught the nets of The Consumerist when a customer (a guy named Tom) sent in email exchanges with the company’s email support that showcased godawful customer service.

It could be embarrassing instances such as these that Best Buy swore never to be replicated in the future that it’s now placing its bet on live chat, who knows?

Best Buy’s Attempt to Becoming a Live Chat Superstar

The company is right in its words that email cannot provide the same level of in-the-moment assistance that online chat can do. But installing a live chat widget on their site that allows online chat between customer service reps and customers is only half the picture.

I tried my luck with Best Buy’s online live chat customer service from their global website and this is what I got:

Apparently, the live chat was not available at the moment. I sat it out for a few minutes constantly clicking on the gray “Chat Now” button that I swore I could’ve beat it out at the World Mousecliking Competition. All the sudden the button turned blue. My eyes twinkled! Finally!

By now, I was giddy with relief more than excitement. There’s a pre-chat form I’d need to fill out to connect to a chat agent.

So I did and held my breath… held on some more… had to breathe a wee bit for dear life… held it again… and… there aren’t any chat representatives currently available. By this time, I was ready to call it quits and I’m certain I’m not alone in this feeling. For time-conscious customers going through this can be rather exasperating.

It was told that Best Buy’s live chat performance was less than stunning – with only 5% success rate. Well, I guess I was part of the 95% unfortunate folks. Clearly a case of live chat benefits not quite reaped.

Update: About 20 minutes later I was able to chat with a live chat agent from Best Buy and, overall, it was rather an OK experience considering I got my questions answered.

Why Did Best Buy Fail?

Two factors come to mind after my first-hand experience with Best Buy’s live chat tool – Connectivity and Staffing. Both of them affect the Speed of delivering assistance, which is an important metric for customer satisfaction.

Best Buy is one of the biggest companies in the US. That means they have hundreds of thousands of customers, if not millions, who’ll need customer support at some point in time. That’s no joke. To be able to handle customer support at this scale requires huge effort which includes guaranteeing their online infrastructure is in place for people to be able to connect through live chat effectively.

But to my mind, staffing may be the major culprit. I’m not one to say how many live chat agents are on their roll but I have the impression it’s likely inadequate. Add to that my initial impression that I’m not the only one being handled by the agent on the other line because of the disconnect in the flow of the conversation shown below.

Obviously, I haven’t sent my inquiry yet. It could be the agent pasted a saved response on the wrong chat window (mine) and the last line is intended for another customer (the agent repeated that line to me way through our chat conversation when I asked if I can get a smartphone without a carrier – unactivated, no contract).

The replies also took a bit longer, averaging 5 minutes or so. As a customer, I was expecting the replies to come almost instantly, but for Best Buy’s standards I could be rather demanding.

The beauty of live chat is that you can multitask while chatting. For customers, that’s very convenient in contrast with putting all your attention to holding a phone up your ear. But it seemed like I wasn’t the only one multitasking. I wonder how many people the chat agent was assisting at that time while chatting with me. I hope not one too many.

It could also be that the “delays” I experienced was a connectivity issue – chat exchanges took some time to reach the other end and vice-versa and that the agent had actually been responding promptly to my chats. Well, there’s no way for me to know exactly at this moment. But one thing’s for sure: if Best Buy wanted to ace customer service in live chat, they should guarantee reliable connectivity, sufficient staffing and effective queue management.

Let this be a lesson to all of us who are using live chat on our websites or even those who are considering adding one.

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