“Thank you for calling (insert company name here); the next available employee will be with you shortly, please hold.” We’ve all heard horror stories about being put on hold by customer service hotlines—complete with monotone automated messages and irritating music. Customer service reputation can make or break your business, so it is vitally important to pay special attention to how you are catering to your customers’ needs. Live chat can be a way to supplement a busy customer service hotline because it allows employees to handle customer concerns more efficiently in many different respects. As with anything, there are also cons to having Live Chat correspondence with customers, so you can decide for yourself if the good outweighs the bad.
One of the greatest benefits of adopting a live chat customer service system is that it is incredibly time efficient and makes the customer service experience more convenient. This is because an employee can solve numerous customer inquiries at a time. Another benefit of live chat is its cost efficiency. In fact, studies show that company's sales have increased by 300% after adopting live chat software on their e-commerce site.
That being said, there are also some detriments to adopting a live chat customer service system. For example, first contact resolution is much less common with live chat than it is with customer service hotlines. With the time efficiency that live chat brings, it can also bring an impersonal edge that makes it harder to reach resolution with the customer. Live chat can also be troublesome both because of its inaccessibility and accessibility. Some customers may not be “tech savvy” and may have trouble accessing the live chat which could cause some frustration. On the other side of the coin, there may also be customers that take advantage of the accessibility live chat services and proceed to waste employees’ time. It is important to take all of these things into consideration when making choices about live chat, but it is also important to remember that there is a lot of potential for success using this customer service system.