5 Key Elements of Live-Engagement

The digital world has certainly taken off in the last few years and the majority of websites now have some sort of live chat implemented to assist with inquiries from new and existing customers. This has been met with enthusiasm. Live chat on your website is key to a successful website and more importantly happy and profitable customers so, here are 5 points to make it successful.

1. Staff at the right place & time in a 24/7 world

With a worldwide market, and people’s schedules changing so much, you need to find ideal times that would work for the majority of your customers. Customers are spending less time accessing services, buying cars, getting mortgages or shopping during business hours, which means you need to expand your availability beyond the regular 9-5. One of our customers saw that 44% of their sales happened between 6 pm and 10 pm.

Operational hours have to be effective within the company. If an associate is trained within that area, it doesn’t always mean they know every single answer or even the question on that topic, the operator may need to escalate this further. It could be a complaint, a Human Resource issue or even further down the line of a really technical question. The company will have a separate department for these areas, it is ideal to merge the live chat hours with those separate department hours, so everything can be resolved there and then, this helps to ensure quick customer resolution and no impatient customers waiting around. 

2. Customer Focused Service

When your customer engages with you, they expect to reach a member of your staff that is able to help them with their particular needs right there and then. With live engagement, you are able to get a better understanding of what your customers are looking to resolve. These in-depth interactions allow your agents to quickly understand what your customers are looking for, and how to best implement that solution.

When you have the appropriate staff member working with your customer, you will create a better experience for them, your NPS score could even go up to an average of 85%.

3. Customer Expectations

One key aspect of creating a stellar customer experience is meeting your customers’ expectations. You need to keep them up to date on what is going on when speaking to them even if you’re looking into their needs, or trying to answer their questions. 

When corresponding with your customers over email, it’s difficult to convey how high of a priority they are, which can add to their frustration. With live-engagement, you are able to show how engaged you are throughout their entire experience. 

Engaging with your customers like this isn’t only advantageous because it can create a better experience, it can even affect your bottom line. One of our customers saw their average order value go up by 54% when they used live-engagement.

4. Capture and Leverage  Your Information

One thing typical online interactions fail to capture is building a relationship between a customer and brand. Customers and brands want to have that relationship, and live-engagement opens the opportunity to bring that relationship to life. 

An effective live-engagement platform integrates with your CRM, allowing your team members to access your customer’s information so that they are able to not only identify them, but quickly understand what their typical needs are, and looking at previous conversations.

5. Use of chatBOT

While the world is 24/7, your team can’t necessarily match that pace, so how do you fulfill your customer’s needs for instant satisfaction? If you implement a ChatBOT, your customers will still have an avenue to reach you, even when you’re not online, fulfilling your customer’s need for instantaneous engagement.

ChatBOTs have been defined in the past couple of years with so many companies using them. These are more of a technical design to a ‘Canned chat’ really as an operator robot we could call it. They are used to ask specific questions and get a simple answer or give specific answers to simple questions from the customer. 

Now if these are used correctly, they can really do well on the company website as they can navigate the customer to a certain area or topic. If the ChatBOT doesn’t fully understand the customer, it can then assist in transferring them to an operator. Overall it can help cut costs of operators and have the chatBOT do most of the work.

These are easy steps to put in place whether you have chat today or are looking to add chat to your customer engagement toolbox.