There is no wonder why live chat has become one of the most popular types of support for many businesses, keeping in mind it provides the fastest and usually the most thorough responses.
The customer satisfaction rate when it came to live chat support in 2016 was 73%, which is more efficient than phone or email customer service.
Although live chat has transformed the way businesses communicate with their customers, simply introducing live chat support is not enough. Until your operators learn to use the chat software efficiently and practice the required chat ethics, your business will be far from reaching the desired level of customer satisfaction.
In this article, we are showing you some of the most inappropriate behaviors of live chat operators that may radically decrease your customer satisfaction and, therefore, sabotage your business. Read on and find out how to make your live chat agents your perfect ambassadors.
On this page
What Are the Live Chat Agents Worst Behaviours and How to Change Them?
#1 Not Giving the Right Answer
Providing a relevant response to customer concerns is vital for every live chat agent. You should be aware that unrelated answers won’t take the customer service experience in the right direction, so chat agents shouldn’t provide answers before going to the issue’s root.
Allow the customer to complete their concern before you try to supply a solution. Although you may genuinely feel like helping the customer by being proactive, customers may find it offensive.
After your customers are done asking a question, you can start offering suitable responses. To save customers time and effort, try to be accurate and precise.
#2 Presenting Answers Poorly
When it comes to providing feedback for customers, it’s not all about the right answer, but it’s also about how you present it.
Every credible customer service strategy should be based on flawless grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. The flow of your thoughts should be simple and easily understandable without technical terms or jargon. Remember that your goal is not to confuse but to educate the customers about their areas of concern.
Avoid convolutions at all costs and double-check the quality of your responses before hitting send.
#3 Answering Slowly
The reasons for slow answers can vary. Often, agents may face challenges in providing instant responses because of the complexity of the concern, which is fine. However, if agents become laidback, it’s certainly going to hamper their answering time on chat which can cripple your business reputation.
For faster responses, you can ask your agents to:
- Use proactive features, such as pre-chat surveys for data collection
- Use relevant media, including already made files, images, screenshots, videos
- Set shortcut keys for frequent operations
Finally, no matter what you do, try to stay away from automated responses as much as possible since they aren’t a good solution to this issue. Instead, use carefully tailored canned responses that save answering time and keep up with the quality of the responses.
#4 Not Managing Customer Expectations
Even though your customers may expect an immediate response, a study performed by Gallup showed that there’s something even more important. While fast answers made the customers six times more likely to get highly engaged, the friendly and thorough ones provided nine times greater chances of full client engagement.
Half-cooked answers are an immediate turnoff for most customers as they are not what a customer is expecting from your customer support. As this study has shown, it is obvious that the wait time is not the most important requirement.
What’s more significant is to address customer expectations and provide them with accurate information. It would help if you unambiguously pointed out:
- the predicted wait time for a thorough response
- the customer service working hours
#5 Resembling a robot
Until robots take over live chat agents’ roles, you should keep the human aspect of your personality when talking to customers.
A study performed by Pennsylvania State University showed that customers tend to be happier when interacting with agents that use emojis in their conversations.
Therefore, instead of acting like a software extension, you should be informative, attentive, understanding, and empathetic as an agent. Keep the conversation tone friendly.
#6 Not Being Helpful
Sometimes, the customers who reach out for live chat won’t have a clear idea of what they want. That’s when you’ll be more than welcome to give them a suggestion, an alternative, and even a warning.
If you fail to make them feel like they can trust you and count on your help when looking for a perfect solution, you will fail to retain them, which will affect your business in the wrong way.
Remember that the difference between losing and retaining customers usually lies in your quick but effective answers to the questions that commonly aren’t that difficult to solve, such as:
- What product would be a more convenient option
- What versions of a product they can choose from
#7 Not Having a Meaningful Chat
Even though a live chat agent should solve the issues that customers have and help them decide, you should think beyond it. You are helping the customers overcome the obstacles to become loyal to you in the future.
In accordance, try to turn the dual mode on and deepen your communication – apart from helping them, you should also try to use suggestive selling techniques.
This way, by providing help, you won’t only be supportive. Still, you’ll also promote your business and show excellent customer service skills that will retain many customers.
How to Avoid Lousy Customer Support and Make Customers Happier
To provide a quality live chat support system, you should make sure the live chat agents understand your business values and have a thorough knowledge of the topics they discuss with customers.
The operators who don’t possess relevant knowledge and adequate communication skills may significantly affect your brand’s customer interest. Hence, don’t hesitate to invest in training and educating your operators to provide the best possible results – your customers will appreciate it.
