Normally, customers expect immediate assistance or support when they contact their service providers, especially in their urgent need-situations. And over time, customers have enjoyed immediate help from organizations that uses live chat solutions in engaging their clients. However, Covid-19 has impacted this resulting to several limitations of live chat solutions.
However, things haven’t been as usual for most clients and businesses, especially with the spread of Covid-19 that demands social distancing with no crowd expected within a specific place. But what does that mean to companies and customers?
With the regulations of Covid-19, especially the shift to home working, most businesses that operate live chat services are forced to cope with unpredictable call volumes and unhappy clients. Most of which feel the companies are keeping them waiting for a more extended period. Of course, that’s not a healthy way of customer service. But do the businesses have options?
In this article, we have covered some of how the spread of Covid-19 has impacted business-customer relationships. Also, we tackle how the Corona pandemic has shown the limitations of live chat solutions.
First, let’s take a look at what live chat solutions entail.
Understanding live chat solutions
It’s expected that most customers would have questions, concerns, problems, or issues with a particular service or product. And whenever they experience such challenges, they’d always want their needs to be handled faster and efficiently. And it’s just right you don’t keep your clients waiting for so long because some may be having urgent-relating problems.
However, most businesses have failed to honor their clients’ wishes for immediate support. And why’s that? Not every client is within your locality or time zone. That means reaching you through phone calls is not an option. You may also take time to answer emails, more so when they are numerous and being in other geographical areas; business self-service is not an option.
So, how do you help your clients?
To meet your customers’ needs and wants, you must offer different ways through which your clients can reach you. Among the latest practical and convenient ways a client can get real-time communication with you is through live chat solutions.
What are live chat solutions?
Live chats are technological systems that allow different online businesses or organizations to engage their customers in real-time conversations.
In communicating with clients, businesses can combine live chats with other reinforcing visual agents like links, images, audio, and sometimes even videos. Live conversations ensure you solve most of your customers to realize good customer service.
What are some of the examples of live chat solutions, and how do they work?
How does the live chat solution works?
Most live chat software has a portion that allows company visitors or customers to have text-based communication with the businesses’ sales agents or customer support teams.
Through the chatbox or convenient chat window section, customers or clients can air out their concerns or problems to their service providers for faster assistance.
The good part of the live chat solutions is the real-time back and forth conversation. It ensures the business takes care of their clients within the shortest time possible instead of waiting for an email response that may take the whole day without response.
So, what are some of the examples of live chat channels?
Example of live chat solutions
For great customer experience, meeting customers’ from where they are, most live chat solutions do that perfectly.
Here are some of the examples to consider:
Help on click live chat solution
Help On Click help desk provides real-time chat with hybrid messaging options that allow synchronous and asynchronous communications with your clients.
It is a user-friendly website chat integration interface organized with various tracking and collaboration options to help improve your customers’ loyalty by providing conveniences.
Tawk.to (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)
It’s a free, full-featured live chat solution featuring a sneak peek, support ticket creation, automated triggers, and chat history. These features will help boost your customer experience.
It also includes dozens of native integrations with a focus on your customers’ ecommerce platforms. However, this live cha solution is only found in paid plants.
Live Help Now (Web, Mac, iOS, Android)
With this live chat channel, you’ll be able to track your customers’ satisfaction rates. This live chat solution would help get feedback on your customers’ satisfaction.
But how?
Simple, the chat solution has a customized survey analysis to help track your conversations with your clients. That applies to both negative and positive comments from your customers.
So, should you notice any negative comments that would mean unsatisfied, please find a way to connect with your clients emotionally. It’s very natural for customers to communicate well when they feel emotionally related to the business.
Smartsupp (Web, iOS, Android)
This live chat solution gives you the power to understand how your website’s customers or visitors engage within your sites. What I mean is, this live chat channel helps you monitor various visitors’ behaviors on your pages.
With the basic knowledge of what live chat solutions are, their examples, and how they operate, I believe now it’s the time to address the elephant in the room-
How covid-19 has shown the limitations of live chat solutions
Several benefits come with a business, including live chat solutions into their operations. However, with the increased spread of covid-19 spread and most sales and customer agents working from home, things haven’t been easy for most customers. The reduced number of the support team has negatively impacted customers as much as it has on the business.
Here is the impact of covid-19 on live chat solutions and customer experiences.
Longer waiting times
Even though live chat solutions promises faster and convenient response, it would be safe to say most of the channels are still not up to the task.
Why’s that? During this time where most clients are home and with few numbers of customer support teams. Several customers have complained of services by their service provider.
Most clients say they’re kept on hold for longer hours as the few agents presented at different workstations are overwhelmed with work.
Customers are receiving too may voice mails
Suppose you try to initiate a live call to any of your preferred customer service businesses. In that case, possibilities are that you’ll be kept on hold or receive some voicemail equivalent. This happens because most of these companies are trying to cope with the increased number of individuals at home as of the impact of covid-19.
So to deal with the increased calls and chat volumes, most service providers have opted to toggle the live chat box off. Meaning when a client opens the chatbox, they’re asked to either submit forms or leave a message, and that’s like you send to voicemail.
Poor user experience
Despite the evidence that live chat solutions increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, many clients feel unsatisfied, especially during the covid-19 pandemic.
So what makes most clients unhappy?
As covid-19 regulation demands no crowd, many service industries are shifting agents on the role. That means when one’s shift is over; another agent comes in. This would mean if a customer had previously explained his/her concerns, they’d have to repeat their issues to multiple agents.
Also, most of the live chat solutions lack a history section where an agent would know that a particular client has been served. So should a customer go back to the same site or happen to start a new conversation, they’ll have to repeat everything they had said. This isn’t good for your business as most customers who repeat their issues suffer frustrations, which is a bad customer service experience.
Strict synchronicity
If there is something that links these challenges, then it would be the fact that live chats are synchronous. Meaning both the agent and the client have to stay in touch continuously. Should there be a disconnect in the communication, then the chat session would be terminated. Conversation disconnect happens when one leaves the site or takes longer before replying.
Of course, synchronous conversations aren’t a bad thing. However, with the spread of covid-19, life may get on the way as one may be disrupted with emergencies ten forced to leave the chatbox. However, they won’t be able to continue with their conversations. So sad, right?
Conclusion.
For customers, satisfaction comes when they can get everything they need from their service providers—talk of faster and efficient responses to quality services and products. To help deliver such experiences, most online businesses have opted for live chat solutions for real-time customer experiences and satisfaction.
However, situations like the spread of the covid-19 pandemic have brought out some of the limitations of the live chat solutions to the limelight. Since most business customer agents are home as per the regulations that dictate no social distancing, businesses have been running with fewer agents to run their operations.
And that has seen most clients send to voicemails, kept to wait for longer hours before they could be served. Due to the synchronous nature of most live chat solutions, customers are feeling frustrated for the fact that they keep repeating the issues whenever they might have a communication disconnect.
