Live Chat vs. Phone Support: Which One Is Better for You?
If your company provides digital services, it is crucial to offer the best assistance. Read on to understand the details of live chat vs. phone support.
Introduction
Despite the development of contact centres and the advent of numerous new assistance avenues, speaking with a live person on the phone is still perceived to be the most convenient option. The majority of us find it annoying to wait on hold. But most of us prefer the comfort and customization a phone call offers. However, this does not imply that telephone customer service is the only option. We have an array of other options, such as live chat, and this blog gives you all the details of live chat vs. phone support.
Forrester claims that chat users have a 2.8 times higher conversion rate than non-users.
Live Chat
Customers frequently search online and use websites rather than phone orders or physical storefronts. Therefore, it makes sense for businesses to reach out to customers directly through their websites and meet them where they are. This is where the live chat feature comes into play – it bridges the gap between an agent and a customer via a digital connection. Live Chat software provides a host of advantages over conventional phone support. However, that doesn’t make phone support obsolete in any sense. Phone support has multiple benefits, such as the instant resolution of issues, direct contact with agents, enhanced customer interactions, personalized touch, and faster resolution times.
Benefits of Live Chat
Mentioned below are the key benefits of live chat. Let’s learn about them one by one:
- Efficient and Fast:
Live chat interactions are much shorter and well-known for better and more efficient ways to resolve a problem. Unlike e-mails that sometimes get stored in spam folders, live chat does not have much waiting time compared to other customer support modes, and this is one of the main benefits of live chat.
- Increases Support Capacity:
In contrast to voice support, the live chat feature enables customer support executives to interact with various customers simultaneously. They can help more than one customer as they are aware of previous customer communications, and they use text messages instead of talking on a phone.
- Creates Lead Data:
One of the main reasons why chat is better than voice is that customers’ information is stored directly in the chat window. The executive can access critical customer information right before the chat starts. This is essential to resolve customer queries and extract necessary customer information such as name, email id, location, etc.
- Create Support Data:
Live chat feature tools integrated into the website automatically create indexable and searchable databases of customer issues and complaints. The agents utilize this database to identify general customer queries, new problems, and potential service and product development areas.
- Hands-on Customer Support:
Live chat is the most accessible form of customer communication regarding living chat vs. phone support. The typical response time for live chat varies from 20 seconds to 1 minute. Occasionally, businesses text the customers proactively when they enter their website for them to feel comfortable to state the issue they need to be addressed. This proactive and hands-on mode of customer support is helpful for the customers to make the right purchase decision.
- Helps Build Rapport With Customers:
In a continuous chat, customer service executives can understand and observe a customer’s sentiment and tone and adjust their responses to suit the situation. By changing formality or mirroring style to match a customer, executives can efficiently build rapport and create a helpful, friendly relationship.
Why is Live Chat Right for Your Business?
A live chat service could seem exactly right for your brand in various situations or scenarios. Following are the examples where your business can depend on live chat:
- Online businesses with huge order sales and values could benefit from chat support using mobile phones.
- An online subscription-based brand can leave your company with many questions that need immediate answers from live chat customer support.
- Owning a business that runs only on its mobile application requires live chat services to respond to all customer queries.
- Organizations can decrease support costs by allowing live chat support on their websites.
- To create more leads, an organization can use the live chat feature to convert website visitors to actual customers.
Conclusion
Customers at present are getting more comfortable with live chat technology, and the fact is that they not only expect it but prefer it too. Beyond enhancing the customer experience, live chat helps to increase the agent’s productivity, combined with the data you can collect — which will result in tremendous success when live chat is a part of your customer support strategy.
Temasys Communications is one of the live chat technology providers. Its product, Skylink Cube solutions, makes it extremely easy for businesses to improve customer experiences via its live chat, instant messaging, video, and many more services. Skylink Cube is the simplest way to build human interactions on apps and websites without code.
