Managing multiple conversations at once can be challenging for most live chat agents. Large numbers of queries dropping in simultaneously can be difficult to prioritise quickly based on the urgency of demand. Often agents might not be able to offer their full focus to any single request in particular. Long waiting times in such scenarios can turn away customers who are looking for urgent and effortless resolution upon the first contact.
Divided attention among multiple customer problems can also lead to loss of support quality. Customers might end up receiving insufficient or incorrect information and lose trust in the brand. Many could feel ignored or unacknowledged and might decide to switch loyalties.
Aside from resulting in subpar customer experiences, agents themselves are at the risk of burnout owing to high stress and cognitive loads, resulting in loss of productivity.
As such, a successful Live Chat platform should be able to deliver superior levels of customer satisfaction while ensuring high cost-effectiveness for your business. It must empower your agents with the right collaborative tools and resources, in real-time, to be capable of providing the best solutions to customer questions, instantly and seamlessly, 24/7, while ensuring great business outcomes.
Here are a few things you should keep in mind when selecting the right Live Chat platform for your enterprise:
1. High concurrency
Having your agents effectively manage multiple chat requests at once with steadfast accuracy and little inconvenience can manifest brilliant results in massive cost savings. Leveraging a platform powered by the right AI technologies that can intelligently route customer requests to the best agents based on their work history and problem-solving efficiency can empower support representatives to be more productive with their time and effort.
Such a platform with an optimized user interface and AI-facilitated, real-time assistance, with the instant provision of critical customer information when required, can reduce agents’ cognitive load and help them think on their feet while they engage in more concurrent conversations and craft meaningful and positively impacting customer experiences.
2. Personalized support, 24/7
The right Live Chat platform should be able to ensure that you can be available for your customers and visitors 24/7 for 1:1 engagement. It must help you gather essential customer data in real-time to be able to incisively sketch individual customer profiles, make keen and increasingly relevant personalized recommendations, and deliver truly unique experiences.
3. Complete, Real-Time Engagement
Limiting your customer to just text via Live Chat can be useful in ordinary situations but certain nuanced and complex problems can demand conduits that allow for more enhanced communication. In order to get a deeper understanding of customer desires and behaviours and craft exceptionally interactive experiences, you must have video-chat capabilities to be able to walk your customer through the problem to a satisfyingly lucid solution.
The platform should also have advanced co-browsing capabilities should you need to collaborate with the customer’s browser itself and navigate their screen along with them in real-time, in order to guide them with a heightened sense of convenience, comfort, and assurance.
4. Intelligent Routing
The right Live Chat platform will be aided by the collaborative intelligence of AI to ensure that chat requests are triaged to the best agent and routing is optimized for faster response times by real-time configuration of parameters like agent idle time, chat history and more.
5. Advanced Customization
You must be able to leverage a wide array of functionalities with your Live Chat platform to be able to facilitate an easy-to-use UI experience. For instance, the graphics of your Live Chat interface must be finely customizable as per your brand style and personality to match the look and feel of your website.
6. Omni-Channel Experiences
A rewarding Live Chat platform will have pre-built integration capabilities for the website, app, popular core software, and commonly used customer support channels like Skype for Business, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Slack, Genesys chat, Intercom and more, to ensure that you can provide seamless and fluid channel-agnostic support experiences.
7. Insights From Real-Time Customer Monitoring and Historical Data
Having the ability to track visitors as they move through your website in real-time can help you understand traffic patterns and send proactive chat invites. A historical overview of your customers’ and visitors’ conversations, activities, location, demographics, and website journeys can illuminate you with an analytical understanding of their behaviors and help you anticipate their needs more accurately for crafting increasingly informed and delightful customer support experiences.
8. Multilingual Support
Multilingual capabilities will help you converse with your customers in their local languages with region-specific terminologies and nuances. This can be critical when serving an increasingly growing and truly global customer base, interacting every day in German, French, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese, and more.
9. Track Agent Performance
A Live Chat platform complete with an intuitive dashboard for all-in-one access to the agents’ activity history, customer ratings, and feedback on chat support effectiveness across multiple channels, can be truly enriching for agents’ perpetual performance improvement and crafting increasingly refined experiences.
10. Secure On-premise and Cloud Deployment
You must be able to deploy your Live Chat solution flexibly as per your business needs. Hosting facilities must be available for cloud as well as for complete on-premise deployment, complete with at least a 256-bit encryption for all communication — at both transmission and rest — to ensure utmost data security and GDPR compliance.
