Email and phone calls are old school customer support tools. The new generation technology has reshaped the way customers want to reach you. This is an era of AI chatbots and Live Chats where real-time communication has become an indicator of a company’s prestige. Instant answers and rapid solutions represent the key factors of excellent customer service.

Moreover, a g2crowd study has found that live chat has a 73 percent satisfaction rate as a tool for customers to reach desired businesses. Big companies have realized this opportunity and have installed the latest customer support software that includes both automated and customer rep chats. Observing the millions of chat conversations, there are certain best practices that work each time!

Here you will find everything from wording and language, to where to place the chat on your website to improve your churn rate and get the optimal ROI. Let’s dive in!

1. Install a chat window on every web page

Depending on your social media, blog or SEO strategy you may end up sending your customers to different web pages, therefore, they may never visit your homepage. Thus, this may be one of the most important customer support chat tips as it doesn’t matter how much you’ve polished your chat conversation skills if your customers can’t even find the chat box!

And when you consider that according to an eMarketer study, 63 percent of customers with chat experience reported they will return to the site and 62 percent claimed they would purchase again, you should start checking the top AI and Live Chat Options!

2. Add chat to the right-hand corner

To be successful at chatting, you need to think and act as a customer to determine the best possible chat position. The goal here is to make it even easier for customers to find you or at least suggest contacting you. Thus, a smart move would be to place your chat box in the lower right corner.

This chat support tip is relevant as many psychological experiments have confirmed that people first notice the right side of a picture instinctively. You may not need to make it pop up immediately when they open a page. However, it is essential that your customer support chat is right there when they need you!

3. Create an attention grabber

Many times customers get lost trying to find a specific product or a service explanation that causes them to leave your site early. Yes, you may have hired the best copywriters who showcased your brand identity well and created a user-friendly interface that should only increase customer engagement. However, customers aren’t experts and it can take them a lot of time to find their way to purchasing your product.

Having an appealing attention grabber can help you overcome this chat support obstacle. You can automate chats to approach your customers when they still haven’t realized they need you. Don’t make your customers feel helpless, instead, give them a hand. This is how you can prevent losing prospects and increase your conversion rate.

4. Tailor communication to your customers’ style

While an AI chatbot can help you provide instant assistance, Live Chat is beneficial in terms of empathetic chatting with your customers. This customer support chat tip is crucial for delivering effective human-like answers.

Social mimicking is a fundamental part of human interaction. In real life we observe gestures, facial movements as well as verbal communication. These things may be harder to catch in the digital world, however, they have their alternatives. For instance, greetings are neutral.

But what you can do to be with your customer on a professional, yet friendly level is to observe the writing style and language they use. If they approach you in a more casual style, then you may consider doing the same. Simply put, don’t keep them at a  distance if they would like to be more familiar and comfortable.

5. Establish a human connection

Sometimes it is hard to preserve a cheerful and professional demeanor while communicating with customers due to their rudeness or the agents’ lack of skills and knowledge. However, as we mentioned, the human touch is the main benefit of live chat, thus you should utilize it wisely.

The must-know customer support chat tips here are:

• Personalize the chat experience: You can start a chat by using visitor’s name and personalize your whole response, including greetings.
• Build trust: make a connection by using real agent names and photos to make your customers feel like they are talking to a real human being.
• Spread positivity: To engender some level of appropriate informality you should use a positive tone and exclamation points. This is how you can create a positive atmosphere and reduce the risk of your agents being misconstrued.
• Implement voice and video call practices: To humanize your conversations with customers even more, you can use voice and video chat tools to reassure them that there really is another person at the other side of the chat.

6. Be direct

One of a company’s biggest fears is damaging their professional image and brand. Thus, they tend to sound overly formal, creating distance with their customers. Instead, you can use direct language to help them solve their issues, meeting their needs in the way they would like you to. Keep it simple, so that they can understand you better.

Formality is not a key to building long-term customer relationships. Sometimes it creates more of a barrier and rigid first impression that either leaves a bad impression or doesn’t stay in customers’ minds for long. Thus, consider adding some soft informality in your messages. They will sound more natural, therefore more appealing, ensuring your customers will look forward to coming back.

7. Avoid long stories

No one likes long-winded chatters – neither in real life nor in chat boxes. The beauty of the chat box is that it provides quick and easy communication, rather than lengthy emails. Avoid creating long paragraphs that offer all solution steps at once as your customer may get lost in it quickly. Instead, break your process into short steps and send one step after another.

In this way you can:

• Enable easy correction: if you are not providing the answer your customer is looking for then they can quickly stop you by saying they meant something else. In this way, you will have enough time to make required changes and direct communication toward another solution. Additionally, you won’t waste time on explaining a solution or answer to the wrong problem.
• Customer engagement: by serving solutions in small bites you are not overloading your customer with information, making the overall communication more pleasant for everyone and increasing the customer engagement.
  

8. Automate questions

Automation is a true game-changer when it comes to chat support tips. Now you can redirect your customer support investments toward tech solutions that enable automated questions and responses and save an enormous amount of time and money. Questions such as “how can I help you?”  and responses such as “thank you for your visit” can pop up any time your customer opens your web page. AI chatbot is your way to go when you want this job to be done.

They work 24/7 and are always there when someone needs your help. You can make your AI-driven chatbot a part of your daily Live Chat routine to boost your response rate. They meet basic needs following simple phrases to direct customers to the next solution level. That level is usually a specific department that can actually resolve their problems. Some chatbots such as Carin can handle even more complex requests such as, “When will my package be delivered?” Doesn’t that sound like a great addition to your customer support team?

9. Use Live Chat suggestions

The latest innovation in the customer support industry are live chat suggestions that make live chatting even quicker. You may be asking yourself how can you automate real communication?  Well, it is possible while also not reducing the quality of service. Moreover, this technique even improves the conversation.

Now your agent only needs to click on suggested words or word phrases to provide a rapid answer. Those suggestions are made with a help of machine-learning that remembers your previous answers, helping you create an answer pattern you can use for millions of customers with the same problem!

10. Encourage the use of knowledge base

To minimize the work needed, you can invite your customers in the chat to visit your knowledge-base and build up their self-service skills. With a thorough knowledge-base, it becomes easier for both your customers and employees to solve problems. However, you need to make sure to facilitate searching through your knowledge base as much as possible.

Some quick chat support tips for this technique are:

• Use search tags for knowledge content
• Apply tags that your customers will most likely use
• Create tags that match keywords to make searching for articles even easier

A knowledge base or help center is the greatest money saver, and therefore revenue booster, of all the customer support options today!