BPO service is everything in the e-commerce world. Competing on price is exceptionally tricky. A brick-and-mortar store with the right location can charge more, but the site is irrelevant online. Competing on selection is comparably tough. Most things are sourced from the same suppliers. A given product can be purchased from any one of hundreds of stores.
The key, then, is providing the best experience. Make your customers happy with your services, so they want to buy more things through your store. They’ll experience it again to avoid the comparatively-dire services from your competitors.
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But how do you do this? Well, something that every top retailer offers these days is the live chat functionality. Instead of tasking people with entrusting their queries or complaints to confusing ticketing systems, they engage with them in real-time through chat windows.
Live chat support combines real-time conversation with the ability to share links, collect information, and save a full transcript for later reference. It is the ideal BPO service tool for a customer who needs immediate help.
Getting started with live chat support is simple, but making live chat a sustainable, practical part of your BPO customer service strategy takes careful thought and effort. Read on to learn why live chat support matters, how to add it to your support mix, and what it takes to deliver a great live chat support experience.
BPO Service: What is live chat support?
Live chat support allows customers to have text-based conversations with support teams via the web. Using live chat software embedded on the company’s website, customers can send their questions to a person (or sometimes an AI bot) who can quickly reply in the same small window.
The “live” part of live chat support references real-time, back-and-forth conversation instead of email support, where there may be no expectation of an immediate reply. Like Help Scout’s Beacon, some tools combine real-time live chat with a hybrid messaging option, allowing synchronous and asynchronous conversations to happen in the same chat tool.
Live chat software is also used for purposes beyond support — for example, to enable sales conversations. However, live chat software, which is built for delivering outstanding support, may include additional support-focused features such as deep integration with the knowledge base and shared inbox tools.
The benefits of live chat as a support channel
Why should you offer live chat support to your BPO customers? Because customers love it!
Studies show that live chat is the preferred choice of many customers, and it has the highest customer satisfaction level of any support channel.
Considering the key benefits of live chat support can help you decide whether it is the right choice for your business.
Live chat BPO service is highly accessible
Live chat software can be integrated right into your BPO customer’s workflow through a consistently available button or link on your website or in your app. Your customer doesn’t need to hunt down a unique contact page or dig up an email address; they know exactly where to go when they need help.
That accessibility reduces customer effort, an essential factor in building customer loyalty.
Rolling out live chat for a small team
Add support-focused chat where it is most valuable
Chat doesn’t have to be enabled all the time or on every part of your website. By being selective about when and where you allow discussion, you can reduce the workload and improve the efficiency of the channel.
Start by identifying critical points in your customer’s support journey. A short conversation could prevent a much longer email back and forth and possibly save a customer some trouble (and the sale from being lost).
A good chat opportunity is one where your customer’s initial question is unclear and lacking the information you need to resolve it or one where what’s need is a little confidence building. A live conversation could be much more efficient at handling those situations.
For example, consider adding a chat option to:
- Your “returns” page:A customer requesting a return might truly need a refund, but they might also be confused about the product they have and need some quick information to feel completely satisfied.
- Your VIPs pages:Integrate your chat tool with order history or lifetime value for your customers, and give your highest value customers access to your support chat channel without having to show it for every customer.
- Shipping FAQ pages:The period between ordering and delivery can be nerve-racking for customers. Having a live chat can build confidence and shortcut many “where’s my item?” emails.
Adding live chat support into the customer service experience
Adding a brand new support channel to your BPO service offering isn’t a step to take lightly. Often, you will be taking your existing resources (your team, their working hours, and their set of skills) and giving help across more locations. That can be a stretch.
Before you leap into offering live chat support everywhere at once, consider these questions:
- Who will you offer live chat support to? You don’t need to make chat an option for every customer or prospect who visits your site. Perhaps you offer live chat to your VIP clients or newly onboarding customers.
- Where is live chat support most valuable? Are there pinch points in your app or sales funnel where having a real-time conversation can help people get unstuck and maintain their momentum? Consider providing live chat support only at those moments, at least initially.
- How will you balance your support channels? Look at the time and skills you have to work with, and decide how many hours you can feasibly cover with live chat support. Compare that to the support volume you have incoming through your other channels, and decide on a sustainable mix between them all. You won’t get it right the first time, but you can make an educated guess.
- How will live chat integrate with your existing help desk or CRM? The more you know about your customers and their history with you, the better BPO service you can offer. Choose a live chat support tool that will connect each chat conversation with what you already know about that customer to avoid losing valuable context.
- What training or resources will you need? Give your team the best possible chance to succeed by reviewing their backgrounds and skills and providing them with guidance on what good chat support looks like. Giving excellent BPO service through live chat is a different skill set than email or even phone support.
As you integrate your new live chat support channel, begin collecting data about what is working, how customers react, and where your team might need additional help to deliver the best possible support experience.
Live chat support best practices as a manager
If you’re responsible for setting up and managing the live chat support channel, there are some moves you can make to improve the experience for your staff and your customers
- Keep the incoming volume manageable. Your customers look to chat for quick, accessible interaction with your team. If your chat team struggles to keep up, the customer experience will suffer. Use reporting to keep an eye on the overall volume and response time and take action if needed. Consider offering chat only during specific time windows, or to certain customer groups, as a way to control volume.
- Don’t overload your support agents. A typical support agent can handle two or three concurrent chats without losing BPO service quality, but that depends heavily on the type of questions they are answering and the levels of experience of both customer and agent. You should set a maximum chat number so that no one team member is satisfaction
- Overwhelmed with chat requests.
Provide real-time customer support with live chat
- One of the most popular ways to use live chat is for customer support.
- The main benefit is that it allows your customers to get an instant response to the questions they need answering.
- So, it’s not surprising that 79% of customers say they prefer live chat purely because of the immediacy it offers compared to other channels.
- However, the speed of response is critical.
Forrester’s raising the Bar report found that 1 in 5 customers are willing to stop using a product or service for slow response times via online chat.
So, how quickly do customers get their questions answered through chat?
Well, the average response time for emails is 12 hours.
For social media, it’s 10 hours.
The nine best live chat apps for customer support in 2021
- LiveChat for overall ease of use and functionality
- tawk.to for a free, full-featured live chat app
- Smartsupp for understanding how visitors are engaging with your website
- LiveHelpNow for tracking customer satisfaction
- Olark for a la carte pricing options
- Zendesk Support for a full-featured service suite
- HubSpot for free live chat integrated with a free CRM
- Chatlio for Slack power users
- LiveAgent for agent gamification
What makes a great live chat customer support app?
For consistency, we evaluated each platform using the same five criteria:
- Affordability: Most of the apps on this list start at around $15/user/month and don’t go higher than $100 except in enterprise plans. Some are even free.
- Ease of setup and use: Live chat is designed to be user-friendly even if tech isn’t your thing. That said, some vendors make the user experience more enjoyable than others.
- Management features: Live chat can improve your customer service, but it’s still just a tool. To find success, you’ll need to monitor, measure, and improve your team’s chat performance. Some of the features that can help are staffing prediction, real-time activity reporting, chat monitoring, and automated chat routing.
- Advanced support options: To help make your service staff more efficient, we looked for apps with advanced support features. Even better is a publicly-shared knowledge base, where customers can help themselves from a search of articles. Other features include ticket management, multi-channel chatting (e.g., SMS, social, video), bots, chat transfer, and automated messages.
- Integration capabilities: Ensure the live chat apps integrated natively or through Zapier with popular CRM, helpdesk, marketing, and e-commerce platforms.
Manage customer expectations
Customers typically expect an email response within a day but expect a chat response within a minute or two at most. Carefully consider the design and operation of your chosen chat system so that you do not disappoint your customers by not meeting their expectations for responsiveness.
Ideally, a chat tool should not make it look like someone is available when they are not, let people know when to expect a response, and let you control when and where it shows up for customers.
So review the settings in your chosen chat tool and look for the options that best suit your capacity.
- Can you show the chat option during specific time windows (when you’re most likely to be available)?
- Do you publish specific chat hours so they are visible to your customers?
- Do you have the chat window fall back to a “send a message” option if there are no staff available for live chat?
live chat to improve customer satisfaction rates for BPO Service
The good news is that if you do respond quickly, you will increase overall satisfaction rates.
Comm100 discovered that 82% of customers were satisfied with their live chat experience. Compared to just 61% of email users and a worrying 44% of phone users.
Quick responses mean happy customers and a reduced burden on your customer success team.
And the reason behind this is simple – your customers hate waiting!
It’s one of the main reasons why they stop doing business with you.
So, if you want to improve customer satisfaction rates, you need to respond quickly to live chat requests.
Unfortunately, most companies don’t.
In terms of how long it takes for a company to acknowledge a live chat message, the average wait time is 2 minutes and 40 seconds. That’s almost as long as average wait times for phone support.
Live chat boosts sales and your bottom line
Live chat is now a “must have” communication tool for any business.
As adoption rates for the companies that use chat continue to grow, it’s only a matter of time before all of your competitors are using it.
By harnessing the power of live chat, you could be for BPO Service:
- Increasing sales and revenue
- Providing faster customer support
- Delivering a better customer experience
Considering that live chat is one of, if not the fastest customer communication tools to implement. there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be using it to talk directly to your customers.
At this point, offering live chat BPO service is a straightforward decision to make. It saves time and effort and ramps up efficiency. It also retains the personal touch of phone support and making it easier to sell through great recommendations. Contact
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