Real-Time Customer Support for Solving the Operational Complexities

Everyone needs friends or at least an excellent helping hand from time to time. For making a choice, making the decision, recommending, or sharing the feedback. Yet, with our friends, we are sure about how accurate and swift this support is. But in the time when each website has a support team, we somehow don’t trust it and come just to complain.
Why do we think the website’s support won’t help us? Is there a way to champion your real-time support so that users will go to the chat for something other than complaints? In this article, we’ll investigate the problems of real-time customer support, explore its benefits, and find out how to implement it into your business.
What is real-time support?
Real-time support is providing help in resolving users’ inquiries at the actual time they happen and not hours or days later.
Back in the day, say 15 years ago, users could not answer their questions as efficiently as nowadays. Today with the technology snowballing, there are multiple options to serve customers’ issues all at once. 88% of customers worldwide expect brands to have an online self-service support portal.
Source: Statista
Having this kind of support helps drive revenue firsthand and bring customer satisfaction, but there are also some pitfalls in having real-time support. Use 13Chats to avoid the challenges of real-time customer support.
What are the challenges of real-time support?
Isn’t it devastating when you get zero communication from the service while trying to resolve your issue? You text them, and it takes them days to reply. Or you received an answer by email, which you never check. These are undoubtedly bummers on using your real-time support to the fullest, and there are some others.
Speed of the response
While email communication leaves some time for thinking the answer through, live chats swiftly come up with the response. However, if you have a live chat just for the sake of having it, your marketing success is in danger. Don’t leave all incoming real-time user requests to your team to answer.
Save time and set up welcome messages, standard replies, quick responses, auto-replies to reach prospects within seconds. 13Chats provides these features and your support team can preset answer scenarios for FAQs and resolve some more complex issues in the meantime. You can also use our mobile app to keep up with your chats even on the go.
Phone calls
The call centers era is far from being destroyed, although slowly being taken down by the live chat industry. While chatbots can answer in seconds, it takes an agent undoubtedly more time to help a customer. In fact, according to Comm100, 73% of customers are satisfied with their live chat experience.
However, there are 44% of customers appreciate old-school phone support. So not considering phone support you might be leaving money on the table. While with the live chat you can think through possible conversational scenarios, that’s not very possible with the phone support. Moreover, a live chat is never tired and always polite, but a human operator is prone to get exhausted or simply not be competent enough.
Setting a process
Starting your real-time support flow can become a real pain in the neck. You need to study your audience, their preferred communication channels, gather their contact info, think through various flow scenarios so they work, create texts so that they sell. This all requires time, flexibility, and experience which some marketers lack. With 13Chats, you can launch your live chat in a couple of days without deep coding skills.
Benefits of real-time support
Surely enough, these are just small stumbling stones you can trip over while starting out with real-time online support. Check out the advantages of real-time support and how it can help your marketing strategy.
Solves problems and levels up customer satisfaction
Real-time online support means real customer support for the user. This means customers will get their issues resolved quicker and won’t need to wait for an email or call to get a solution. The communication is result-oriented and when the customers get what they came for, you are one step closer to welcoming another loyal client and avoiding customer churn.
Provides instant gratification
Chatbots are great at multitasking. They can help multiple customers at the same time thus satisfying more clients. Additionally, they provide support even when the human support team isn’t active — outside your business hours. In case of an emergency, such self-service is worth gold and helps the challenged customer sigh with relief and sets a thankful mindset towards your brand.
Reduces costs
Time is money, no stats needed to prove this. With introducing real-time technical support, you are more likely to spend less money on your operational personnel as the chatbot will be obediently resolving trifling issues leaving your team only work with challenging ones.
Together with reduced staff spendings, you spend less money on calls as more and more issues are resolved through the live chat.
Helps you get real-time feedback
When you help your audience in real-time, you get more meaningful feedback as your interaction is fresh in users’ minds, whether it went well or not quite. Whatever the feedback is, you can use it to improve your service and give your team a reason to work better and maybe improve your chatbot scenarios and tailor them to the users’ needs.
Moreover, since the real-time support is all documented in your account, you can also look into the general data of your livechat’s performance. This kind of feedback outlines customers’ feedback by means of their behavior on your website. 13Chats provides you with all sorts of data to analyze your live chat’s performance.
You can see where the visitor has come from, the source and the gadget, which pages they visited, and how much they have spent there. This will help you get a clear idea of when to initiate the chat to be the most helpful.
To get the most of your live chat for A-class real-time support, you should take four paramount steps. Let’s take them together with 13Chats.
How to implement real-time support
Scheduling
Chatbots can help your team set up a comfortable schedule to stay in touch even when your team is unavailable, at night for instance. In this case, build your chatbot so that it asks for the phone number or email address while your support team is inactive. This way you will ensure that your chatbot works for you 24/7, interacts with the clients even when you are away, and thus — breathes in the effect of being there for your clients.
Tools
Choosing a platform that allows you to bundle all sorts of tasks in one place is a daunting process. Your team needs to be able to switch between the chats quickly, have access to the versatile knowledge base, be able to create auto-replies, group the clients, or create notes about the chats.
13Chats combines these and many more features and allows you to manage team members, assign team roles, and set notifications.
Workflows
The conversation flow is quite a blitz in real time, so preset workflows can be used to automate and speed up the communication in every way it is possible. For example, you can create scenarios to encourage the repeating website visitors and offer your help with making a choice. Alternatively, you can see who is on the website, initiate the chat yourself, and communicate with the users.
With 13Chats, you can create welcome and standard replies, unsubscribe from bot messages. You can also create flows based on unique triggers which will start the present workflows.
Communication and feedback
Communication is not only about your customers, but also about your team members. Its productivity is crucial and you need to set up the process in a way they can help each other, rely on the platform’s functionality to fuel up the productivity.
With 13Chats your real-time support team can assign members to deal with this or that issue, create quick replies, and add comments to chats to relieve the further communication between the team. This will help your team members get a clearer view of the chats they didn’t participate in and improve their prioritizing. For this purpose, 13Chats provides an option to add notes to chats.
Final thoughts
Real-time support can be a goldmine or bummer — its effectiveness is on your dedication and effort. Make sure you spend enough time on scheduling, educating your staff, thinking through the workflows that bring you money and loyal customers. First-class real-time technical support isn’t possible without a sufficient tool your team can use.
13Chats provides multiple options for the comfortable work of the support team. What else is there for you? Book a demo and our expert will walk you through the service’s most promising features! 🙂