Providing customers with the option to communicate with you through chat can help boost your conversion rates, increase sales and customer satisfaction, improve customer support services, and build a database of contacts for future marketing campaigns. It can also give you a big advantage over your competitors that don’t offer this service.

But how do you implement live chat effectively? Choosing the right platform and then training your team to use it is critical.

You should look for features that will meet your business’s unique needs, such as e-commerce integrations to help with cart abandonment, or a knowledge base and FAQ section to provide answers on the go. You should also consider how user-friendly the software is for your support agents and whether it integrates with popular CRM, ecommerce and analytics platforms. This can enable automated workflows and ensure data is shared across teams.

A live chat system should also allow your support staff to prioritize and manage incoming requests, monitor agent performance, and track customer engagement metrics. The ability to assign tasks and set up workflows that notify managers and supervisors of specific customer issues can help you better allocate resources. Additionally, you can use live chat to collect customer feedback in-context, so it’s a great opportunity to drive customer loyalty and retention.

To improve the customer experience, Live you should optimize your entire support system for speed and make sure your chat is available during your customers’ most likely shopping hours. Ensure your agents are trained to handle common queries, and to know how to escalate complex problems or product issues to phone or email for resolution. Customers expect personalized experiences, so it’s important to include their first name and consider previous interactions when addressing them.

Depending on the complexity of an issue and the level of expertise of your agents, you may want to set a maximum chat limit per individual. This can prevent your team from being overburdened and unable to provide the best possible service.

A live chat app should also have a feature that can send an automated response to a customer, such as telling them that your team is busy and their query will be dealt with shortly, or giving them an estimated wait time. This is particularly useful if your support agents are offline or busy and can save them time by handling simple, repetitive inquiries. Some systems can also be programmed to gather customer data, including a visitor’s name, their email address and details of the query, which can help to streamline the process of providing a resolution. This can save valuable time and help to avoid misunderstandings between agents. Some systems can also be integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) and help desk solutions. These features can be especially useful for companies with large customer bases. For example, the Zendesk service suite combines chat and talk with social media and a ticketing system to deliver an omnichannel customer service solution.