Is live chat service preferable over telephone or email support

Is Live Chat Service Preferable Over Telephone or Email Support?

Pleasing customers and addressing their queries must always be the top most priority of any company planning to increase sales volume of their products. To keep customers satisfied with your company’s services and make them rely on you, all their questions, complaints and issues should be dealt immediately and comprehensively. Nothing turns the customers away from your company more than a bad customer service. Many factors can contribute to a bad service on your part. First, the customers might have difficulty in approaching you, second, the customers might not get their message across conveniently and third, their questions are not properly answered.

A few decades ago, companies used telephone and mail for customer services. Both the methods though were not completely inconvenient, offered problems as mentioned above. With the advent of the internet, many companies started making their own websites and adopted another way of customer interaction: via the email. Few years ago, a new way of customer service emerged namely, the live chat service. Live chat service offers customers to connect to the company representatives via their official website. As the concept of online shopping evolved, more and more companies started integrating live website chat support in their customer service strategies.

Live chat service offers features that are absent in telephone, mail or email services. Although the latter three are still the most dominant tools of customer services all over the world, and have their own advantages, but live chat service has a few more advantages over them. This article discusses the advantages live chat service has over telephone or email services.

Easier to connect: As mentioned above, one of the biggest contributors towards a customer service failure is the inability of the customers to reach your representative. Communication via telephone can be a problem if your telephone lines are constantly busy, which they mostly are. Many times, customers would wait for hours to reach you that can put them off you. Putting them on hold annoys them further.

Though email is much convenient in that regard, communicating through it also has its drawbacks. Sometimes, the customer might send the e-mail to the wrong address or the representatives might be bombarded with so many emails that some e-mails are neglected or answered late. With live chat service, it becomes easier for the customer to get connected to your representative. The representative is available online 24/7 for the chat so that customer can interact more conveniently.

It’s easier to talk through writing: Interaction through emails also occurs in the written form but it does not allow the exchange of dialogues on immediate basis. You can send a lengthy email about your problem, the reply to which you receive after some days, if you are not satisfied with the answer you would have to send in an e-mail again and wait for days to get answer. In a live chat service, you can exchange dialogues with the representative in a written form. Talking via phone has limitations such as, sometimes you cannot understand what the other person is saying, there is distortion on the line or there is a language barrier.

Allows Multitasking and saves time: The main feature that sets live chat service apart from other customer service mediums is that it

allows multitasking. With telephones and email, you can only deal with one customer at a time but through live chat service, agents can deal more than one customer at a time. To answer generic and common questions mostly asked by customers, your representative can use canned messages as well.

Adding chat to the website of your company enhances the customer interaction along with convenience. It allows your representatives to deal with your customers more comfortably and gives them a chance to properly address to their queries.