Delivering superior customer service with live chat

Applications have become a part of our lives. Especially the ones that allow us to stay in touch with our friends, colleagues, and families with just a click. Chat applications such as WhatsApp, Skype, or Facebook Messenger are fast becoming common ways of interacting. And in unprecedented times such as now, with global pandemic affecting our lives in every way, such chat applications act as support enabling us to stay connected with the world.

Live chat software has also permeated business operations. They are the new “must-have” for organizations looking to make customer services more personalized and responsive. If we look around, we see a majority of companies be it banking, insurance, or utilities already have live chat options on their websites. Live chat helps bring customers closer to support teams in just a click.

In many cases, live chat with chatbot capabilities using unified dashboards is helping transform the customer service landscape by reducing the effort and turnaround time required to serve the customers. Chatbots are effective in handling basic customer requests such as product enquire or status of a request or complaint. When the requests are more complex and require higher cognitive skills, it can be easily transferred to a live agent for resolution. Live agent applications come with a variety of features making the experience both seamless and enriching for both customers as well as the support agents.

With COVID-19 giving rise to an additional challenge for the customer service operations with increasing norms of lockdowns, social distancing & work from home, organizations across the world are facing challenges. Not all business operations can run smoothly in the work from home model, especially the ones which require face-to-face interactions with the customer or the need to refer to data to provide support to the customer online. As the global pandemic led to reduced availability of people supporting the contact centers, this resulted in the high acceptance of live chat agents with chatbots to provide service to customers.

As opposed to the calling model, the live chat with the chatbot model helped reduce the load on customer care executives and helped improve the customer experience by reducing the turnaround time for service request resolution. For example, a customer service agent can only attend to one customer at a time when on phone, but that same agent can manage multiple online chats simultaneously. Live chat agents working remotely can access a lot of knowledge articles or earlier chat interactions for reference thus reducing dependency on the supervisor or colleague. Should there be a need, the live chat can be transferred easily for the supervisor to handle any escalations. The live agent has a lot of pre-canned messages to quickly respond to customers without typing in. This helps to standardize the analytics around live chats. All these features help make customer service a delightful experience both for customers as well as customer care executives.

AssistEdge Engage offers key capabilities around automation and collaboration in customer service space through Live chat, Co-browse, Unified Dashboard, and One-Click automation. AssistEdge Engage Chat brings in the capabilities around live chat interaction with customers like intelligent routing, context transition, canned messages for quicker and standard response, ability to capture feedback and access to knowledge articles, or earlier chats for quick response for a complex request.

Here’s the link to a customer case study which showcases how AssistEdge Engage Chat helped an organization in managing and exceeding customer experience in during COVID-19.