We don’t want to pronounce a clear winner in this debate. Instead, we want to give the company the facts it intends to make the best judgment possible given the circumstances.
In an ideal environment, any company will aim to provide help across every available channel. But, this is not feasible.
The more service channels your company tries to have, the more details it has to handle, the more agents it has to employ, and the more tools it has to buy.
As a result, any company necessarily cannot take advantage of any available contact medium.
Instead, it’s critical to consider both Phone and Live Chat’s advantages and disadvantages to help determine where each medium is appropriate.
Some companies may be able to get along with only doing Live Chat on their website or smartphone app. But, others may need the customized service that only a phone call can have.
The History of Live Chat
Businesses have undergone a host of significant changes due to the internet’s growth to keep up with technology.
Let’s face it, and if the company doesn’t have a website in 2018, you’re going to struggle.
Businesses find opportunities to satisfy their prospects on the networks they still use as more consumers found their way to the internet. Live Chat arose as a result of this.
You might quickly suggest that Live Chat’s origins date back to the 1970s when University of Illinois researchers created Talkomatic, the first online chat device.
It’s impossible to pinpoint when Live Chat for help was first introduced, but some of the first services were established in the early 2000s, such as LiveChat Inc, founded in 2002.
Early networks were simple one-to-one live chat platforms of modest beginnings. Over time, the implementations have evolved to provide even more sophisticated features.
- A streamlined team mailbox that allows you to handle and react to all communications in one place.
- Customers may use chatbots to get help and arrange meetings with officers.
- Real-time traffic tracking allows you to see where your users are on your blog and how they interact with it.
- Automated guest interaction to reach out to customers who may not have opened a chat otherwise.
- Visitor lead scoring and insights will help you qualify the site’s guests and figure out who is most likely to shop.
Live Chat support reflects a precise intersection of available technology and the advancement of customer support.
It allows you to connect directly to your website or even your organization’s smartphone application.
When Is Live Chat Right For A Business?
It’s now impossible to offer single straightforward answers to the issue of “can my company use Live Chat support?
Instead, the company should examine the current service mechanism, and the networks by which consumers communicate. You can also include financial investments to see if Live Chat makes sense.
For various factors, including the fact that the apps don’t need phone lines and agents can answer several calls at once. Live Chat can typically provide a more cost-effective service approach.
This allows the company to offer a broader range of services without paying more for additional services or recruiting more agents.
But that doesn’t mean Live Chat can take the place of the company’s phone support. In many cases, the safest way is to combine the two networks to give your customers an omnichannel experience.
After knowing more about the benefits and drawbacks of Live Chat help, it’s easy to see how the channel will be more useful in the following scenarios:
Live Chat can be highly beneficial to businesses that mainly deal with web sales and commerce. Take Amazon, for example, they do have a phone service, but their central support platform is Live Chat on their website.
If the company only runs with a smartphone app, integrating Live Chat into the app is the most convenient way to offer service to consumers and clients. You can meet them where they are now.
Users will start a chat right from the app rather than exit the app, lookup a phone number, and dial it — we’ve seen this in other solutions like Ujet.
Live Chat allows businesses to offer service to more customers and fewer agents when it comes to cost-cutting.
On top of that, the approach would not necessitate expensive telecom services or contact center platforms.
These systems can come with their ticketing or partnership management tools or be conveniently integrated with existing CRM software.
Live Chat is a great way to increase online purchases. These services usually provide real-time applications for monitoring and qualifying leads on the website.
When Is Phone Support Right For A Business?
Although Live Chat has a compelling argument to make, it doesn’t mean that good old-fashioned phone support is extinct.
In reality, there is a range of advantages of using Phone Support that Live Chat and other platforms cannot match.
Phone Support allows the agents to intuitively react to the caller’s needs, requests, and even emotions, for starters.
In contrast to a robotic text message, having a voice chat with another person will make callers feel more at ease.
On the other hand, customers and clients are becoming more frustrated with Phone Support and are expecting quicker resolution times with less waiting. The truth is that Phone Support isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
A phone call is often all that is required to get the assistance you need. Many clients are unaware of the existence of Live Chat but are familiar with Phone Support.
Whatever the situation might be, it’s understandable that Phone Support is still available and will continue to be so.
When developing a support platform, there are various aspects and scenarios to remember, all of which depend on the advantages of phone support.
Apart from dealing with a delegate in person, phone support is simply the most intimate support channel.
Live chat does not have the same interaction level as communicating with another human. It does not encourage agents to pick up on subtleties such as tone and sentiment.
Phone Support could be required if the company deals with high-end or VIP goods or clients to have the customized. Human touch that many have come to expect, particularly in high-end markets.
When consumers pay a premium for a high-end good or service, they want it to go with high-end help.
Conversations with Phone Support are far more natural and complex. When problems become much more complicated and severe, they must be escalated to a more effective communication means.
Live Chat is a perfect option for addressing small user queries and client questions. Still, when issues become much more advanced and complex, they must be escalated to a more efficient communication means.
Phone help allows officers to address more complex problems by allowing for a more in-depth chat.
There’s no need for the company to use Live Chat if it doesn’t have an excellent online presence. Live Chat would be unnecessary for brick-and-mortar stores, for example.
Benefits of Live Chat
- Proactive Support
Instead of asking for people to come to you, reach out to them when they are shopping. This allows agents to “nudge” customers into making a transaction on the fence about or for the user to ask a question to get a real-time response before pressing the “Checkout” button.
- Fast Resolution Time
They are taking care of the short and easy questions that consumers want to be answered right away. Instead of switching to a different tab to look up an answer, live chat can be used as an alternative to self-service options. It allows users to ask questions and get immediate responses from an agent.
- Quick Analysis of Conversations
Not only can live chat transcripts take up less space than phone call recordings, but they can also be analyzed more easily. To quickly zero in on the correct meaning, transcripts may be scanned for unique key terms or product names.
Benefits of Phone Support
- Reactive support
Give consumers the assistance they need only when they need it. Allow clients to come to you when they have a problem rather than bothering them with pop-up alerts or push notifications.
- Personalized support
Although phone calls do not replace face-to-face experiences, they are much more intimate than typing into a standardized text field. Listening to another voice on the other end of the line can be soothing for specific callers, and the speaker can answer the listener by name and use their call records to do so.
- In-Depth Analytics
Your company can learn a lot about consumer expectations, patterns, loyalty, and service efficiency levels using phone support and call recording software.
When analyzing call recordings, you can learn more about an interaction’s outcome by looking at things like feelings and sound. These programs also go beyond and beyond by measuring various metrics such as call time, hold time, and more.
- Intuitive Support
Although phone calls allow for a more straightforward dialog, live chat agents can be slow to answer, distracted, or misunderstand your message.
It’s easier for the representative to ask follow-up questions or get a greater understanding of the customer’s needs through phone service. It allows them to have even more intuitive assistance.
Drawbacks of Live Chat
When agents are forced to multitask, they are prone to be overwhelmed. Although agents can manage several service conversations at once, doing so allows them to expend less time on each one and thin their attention.
Though Live Chat is real-time, agents can be slow to respond, and information can easily be lost in translation due to a text chat’s back-and-forth nature. Hearing someone’s voice makes the exchange sound more intimate.
When it comes to response time, agents must respond rapidly, or users may leave a conversation. There can think no one is on the other end or that they are dealing with a bot rather than a live human.
Though hoax phone calls do occur, IVRs and auto-attendants will assist in weeding them out. Malicious attackers are far more likely to target live chat solutions.
Drawbacks Of Phone Support
Customers want fast assistance, plain and clear. Phone service usually entails dealing with a time-consuming auto-attendant before being put on hold to wait for an official, something no one wants to do. In specific ways, phone service is slower than Live Chat.
Each contact requires more time from agents. Compared to other options, operators can only answer one phone call at a time, restricting the number of people they can assist in the same period.
It can be not easy to schedule around peak rushes, such as seasonal shifts, since agents can only accommodate one contact at a time.
This necessitates further preparation from the contact center, including training, recruiting, and rotating personnel.
One agent can manage several requests with Live Chat, reducing the number of agents needed.
Conclusion
Finally, it’s almost difficult to declare one answer “better” than another at the end of the day. In different situations, different tools, solutions, apps, and channels will perform better.
Live Chat is a fast and it’s also convenient way for clients and consumers to contact your company, which does not mean it is the right or chosen process.
Many consumers still want the personalized link that a phone call will offer, but they still wish to serve as efficiently and conveniently as possible.
Any Contact Center must aim for a blended, omnichannel approach in an ideal future, which incorporates as many networks as possible into a seamless experience.
Knowing whether to use various contact and service networks is a crucial differentiator that makes businesses stand out from the competition.
Don’t dismiss Live Chat as a fad or Phone Support as a dinosaur; instead, understand both the benefits and disadvantages of having the best possible user experience.