With the rise of digital channels becoming an increasingly popular way for customers to interact with their brands of choice, web chat has become an indispensable channel to communicate with customers.
Live web chat is a powerful channel that enables synchronous communication through a web-based solution, facilitating conversations between customers and agents. Web chat provides convenience and flexibility for customers to quickly ask questions and access real-time support while browsing a website.
When considering the best live web chat software, you must consider these four essential features to ensure an optimal customer experience.
- Transcripts and response templates:
There are several tools a live web chat solution provides that can help improve the customer and agent experience. For instance, a ‘Chat Transcript’ is a digital record of a web chat interaction between a customer and an agent. Managers can use chat transcripts to assess all historic interactions where themes, frequent phrases and words used can be identified. Transcripts are a valuable way to surface common customer enquiries so an organisation can understand how to improve the customer experience. One way of improving response times and accuracy of information is by creating ‘Canned responses.’
A Canned Response is a pre-prepared reply to a question that an agent can select to send to the customer. This functionality minimises the time it takes for agents to respond to frequently asked web chat enquiries. It improves their experience by alleviating the requirement to type the same answer to a repetitive question. Leveraging canned responses can lead to a faster resolution time, optimising the overall customer experience.
- Brand customisations:
Organisations aim to deliver a consistent brand experience across each customer touchpoint with a brand. This cohesive approach ensures that customers recognize and understand the brand.
To deliver a unified brand experience, the live web chat solution must provide customization abilities. The look and feel of the chat widget should seamlessly integrate with the website it is hosted on. Chat widgets can be customised to display your brand logo and colours for the header, message bubbles and background. In turn, this will help your organisation deliver a consistent brand experience.
- Reporting and metrics:
From an organisational standpoint, measuring and evaluating performance across every touchpoint is necessary. Ensure the live web chat solution incorporates an in-built reporting module so managers can gain visibility and draw insights into how customers are served across this communication channel.
Analysing the following metrics can provide actionable insights that can be used to improve the customer experience:
- Average handling time
- Number of web chats transferred to a call
- Interaction abandonment rate
- Customer satisfaction
- Pre-chat and Post-chat Surveys:
Launching a pre-chat survey before a web chat interaction commences can provide the agent with relevant information before engaging with the customer. For instance, a pre-chat survey can ask the website visitor to enter their name and email. The agent can then search for the customer’s profile within their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database, which can assist in personalising the interaction. Additionally, a pre-chat survey can be designed to ask a question regarding the reason behind their enquiry through utilising a drop-down picklist, where the customer can select the applicable option, i.e., ‘Estimated delivery date on a parcel,’ ‘Redirect an order that has been placed,’ ‘Promotional offer.’ Being armed with this level of information before interacting with the customer can help the agent to deliver a seamless customer experience and reduce the time it takes to resolve their enquiry.
On the other hand, launching a post-chat survey after a web chat interaction has finished can enable your organisation to collect direct customer feedback. The post-chat survey is an opportunity to ask the customer questions regarding their experience, e.g., “What would you rate your experience out of 10?” or “Do you have any recommendations on how we can improve our service?”. Capturing this data through a post-chat survey can allow your organisation to measure customer satisfaction and identify strategies to improve customer experience.
Overall, when evaluating the best web chat software, consider these four essential features that can help deliver a positive customer experience.
If you’d like to discover the robust functionality of ipSCAPE’s web chat communication channel, get in touch to find out how ipSCAPE’s award-winning software can help you improve your customer experiences.
ipSCAPE is a feature-rich, scalable cloud communication technology solution with advanced integration capabilities. We help businesses connect with their customers through multi-channel communications, including Voice, Web Chat, Email, SMS, IVR, and other emerging channels.