Top 12 Live Chat Best Practices for Exceptional Customer Service

Not every customer likes making a call or waiting for an email response. They want instant and personalized service from businesses.

Why wait? Offer instant answers with live chat support!

Live chat support is an instant support channel for customers to have 1:1 back-and-forth messaging with live agents. Customers can start the chat when they are in need and get instant responses right away. No calls, no complicated phone menus, and no waiting time!

Live chat is a bridge for real-time customer needs and business efficiency. It is directly linked to customer satisfaction and sales, as 85% of customers feel satisfied using live chat, and 79% of businesses report a positive effect on sales, customer loyalty, and revenue.

In this guide, we intend to lift up your game by sharing the top-most live chat best practices. So, follow along to deliver exceptional customer service with live chat.

What are the Benefits of Live Chat Best Practices?

Integrating live chat into your website or app isn't enough. You need to make it responsive and valuable for customers to maximize its benefits over operational costs.

Implementing live chat customer service best practices optimizes the effectiveness of this instant communication channel. Some of the key benefits you can achieve include:

Improved Customer Experience

In the past, customers were comfortable waiting for a response to their queries. They would be willing to hold on the call or wait for an email reply. However, 90% of customers now want instant responses.

An effective live chat system ensures that customers get the instant and personalized responses they expect. Agents would be readily available to entertain customers and offer them a satisfactory experience.

Increased Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness

A live chat that intelligently routes chats to the right agents and empowers agents to handle multiple chats at once increases overall operational efficiency. This multi-tasking capability means fewer agents are required to serve more customers. In addition, it lowers expensive callbacks or prolonged email threads.

Higher Conversion Rates

Proactive and well-timed chat invitations can influence a customer's decision. When the live chat support helps customers exactly when they need help, it helps them make the purchase decision. Research shows that customers who engage in live chat are 2.8x more likely to convert.

Useful Customer Insights

Live chat provides real-time feedback on recurring questions and pain points. These insights are then used to update products/services and improve self-service options. Moreover, these insights are also useful for analyzing customer behavior and optimizing future interactions.

Improved Brand Loyalty

Customers prefer doing business with responsive and consistent brands. When customers get a timely response to their queries, they feel valued. This drives repeat purchases and brand loyalty, which also increases referrals. In fact, 72% of customers share a positive experience with six or more people.

Top 12 Live Chat Best Practices for Customer Service

It isn't easy to deliver consistently exceptional customer service through live chat, but it shouldn't be complicated. Below, we have shortlisted the top 12 live chat best practices to deliver great customer service:

#1 Keep Response Time Low

The purpose of live chat is to provide customers with instant support. So, how effective is it if customers still have to wait to get a response?

You have to lower the response times and try to offer almost instant responses to customers.

#2 Strategic Placement of the Chat Widget

Customers can use live chat only if they can spot it whenever they need it. The placement of the chat widget is very important. It should be easily accessible to customers and should not interrupt the natural flow of their browsing experience.

Experts recommend positioning the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the screen. This placement keeps the widget visible but unobtrusive. In addition, the widget location should also adapt for mobile devices, where it is preferred to be placed in the bottom-center area.

Other than that, the chat widget should be available on all high-value pages, like checkout or support pages, to maximize its usefulness.

#3 Use Proactive Chat Invitations

Imagine that a customer is reviewing the pricing page of your software subscription service and lingering on the "Enterprise Plan" details. Instead of waiting for them to initiate contact, a proactive chat invitation pops up saying, "Hi! Need help choosing the right plan for your business?".

This proactive chat invitation at the right moment can clarify concerns and increase the likelihood of a successful purchase.

#4 Route Requests Smartly

One of the best ways to ensure faster resolution is to route requests smartly. If the right support agent attends to the request, the customer's issue can be understood and resolved more efficiently.

How to route requests smartly:

• Use a pre-chat form or an AI chatbot to gather information about the customer's issue.
• Configure intelligent routing rules based on keywords or selected topics.
• Implement a seamless chat transfer system across departments.

#5 Personalize the Conversation

Did you know 71% of consumers want companies to deliver personalized interactions? A personalized conversation makes the customer feel more valued and connected with the brand.

How to personalize the conversation:

• Address customers by their names.
• Reference previous interactions or purchases when applicable.
• Provide personalized responses to the customer's specific situation or needs.

#6 Maintain Consistent Tone and Language

Other than personalization, another crucial live chat support best practice is maintaining a consistent tone and language. Every customer should experience the same quality every time they interact with the support team. This consistency gives them confidence in your brand's professionalism.

How to maintain a consistent tone and language:

• Develop a style guide that outlines tone and language.
• Train agents with brand guidelines on tone and language.
• Use an AI chatbot to initiate conversation with customers with the same quality tone.
• Review chat transcripts regularly to optimize tone.

#7 Integrate AI Chatbot

Until now, we have mentioned multiple times to use an AI chatbot in your live chat system. Now, let's talk about this crucial live chat best practice properly.

An AI chatbot is an ideal companion for human agents handling live chats. It serves as a first point of contact whenever a customer opens the live chat widget. It engages with the customer through back-and-forth chat to understand the query. Afterward, it tries to resolve the issue on its own. For complex issues, it diverts the chat to a human agent with complete context and chat history.

The key benefits of using an AI chatbot widget include:

• Handle high volumes of routine inquiries.
• Reduce the workload on human agents and help them focus on complex issues only.
• Offer 24/7 immediate support without delays.
• Provide consistent service.

How to integrate an AI chatbot

AI chatbot integration is simple and quick if you use the right platform. GPTBots provides an all-in-one platform to build and deploy enterprise AI agents. It lets you create LLM-powered AI chatbots trained with a corporate knowledge base and integrated into your website, app, or other communication mediums.

All the above features are the reason why GPTBots' AI agents are able to automate 90% of customer issues and help human agents save time and energy by handling repetitive tasks.

#8 Track Live Chat Metrics

There is no such thing as first-time perfection. Despite implementing a seemingly perfect live chat system, it can have shortcomings. For example, there could be long wait times during peak hours, inconsistency in service quality, etc.

Therefore, another live chat customer service best practice is to track metrics to spot the gaps. Some of the crucial metrics to track include:

• First response time
• Average resolution time
• Chat volume per agent
• First contact resolution rate
• Chat abandonment rate
• Customer satisfaction score
• Chat duration
• Conversion rate from chat

To track these metrics, you can use your live chat software's built-in analytics dashboards. For example, GPTBots offers AI-based data analytics to give instant views on live chat performance.

#9 Have the Right Live Chat Staffing

One reason for long wait times is the lack of available support agents. Although agents can handle multiple chats at once, they are sometimes not enough to handle live chat requests.

You must ensure the correct number of live chat agents who can respond to customer queries with minimal delays.

How to know the right live chat staffing:

• Analyze chat volume trends to determine peak times.
• Schedule staff strategically.
• Cross-train agents to handle multiple issues.

If you have budget constraints, you can integrate the GPTBots AI Agent to automate the resolution of common queries. This way, human agents can get more space and time to tackle complex queries.

#10 Use Real-Time Agent Assist

One of the crucial live chat best practices is to leverage real-time agent assist. It is an AI-powered assistant that offers real-time guidance to agents during interactions.

A real-time agent assist can interpret the customer issue, search the knowledge base for the best solutions, and provide agents with suggested responses. This helps agents respond faster and more accurately and reduces the resolution time.

How to deploy a real-time agent assist:

GPTBots helps you build a full-fledged LLM-powered agent assistant trained with the internal knowledge, databases, and APIs. This agent assistant can help agents instantly access corporate information and resolve issues faster.

#11 Integrate Chat with CRM Systems

Integrating chat with CRM systems is a strategic practice to offer a better customer experience and enhance operational efficiency. Basically, a CRM-integrated live chat means that all customer interactions are stored in one centralized database. The information can include name, contact details, chat transcripts, purchase history, previous support requests, and more.

With this information, agents get access to the full customer profile and can provide personalized customer service. Moreover, agents can quickly understand customer needs and resolve issues.

#12 Ensure Regular Agents Training

We cannot wrap up best practices for live chat without emphasizing the need for regular agent training. No matter how trained your agents may be, you have to train them to match your company standards.

In addition to training them on how to use the live chat tool and answer queries, it is critical to train them on effective communication techniques such as the HEARD method—Hear, Empathize, Apologize, Resolve, and Diagnose.

Regular training should also cover:

• Product and service knowledge
• Technical proficiency
• Realistic simulation exercises
• Sales techniques
• Proficiency in new AI tools

Keep agents in the loop of continuously improving their performance and adapting to new customer needs.

Conclusion

Live chat best practices can elevate conversation outcomes. Lowering response time, proactive chat invitations, personalized and consistent conversations, and other factors can improve customer satisfaction, conversion rate, and brand loyalty.

In addition, GPTBots AI agent scales all the above strategies with instant responses, automated FAQ resolution, and improved human agent productivity. In short, it's like a powerful force multiplier that delivers exceptional customer experiences and boosts operational efficiency.

Ready to transform your live chat? Request a custom demo from GPTBots - Enterprise AI Agent Platform today and offer customers an AI-backed live chat experience.

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