Guest Post: Personalizing Digital Customer Experience with a Live Chat Software

This week we feature an article by Saurav, a marketer and storyteller at Freshworks. He shares how brands can make their customers’ digital experiences more personalized.

Have you recently taken your business online? Are you looking to make your digital customer experience more personalized? Know how live chat software could help you!  

Live chat software is a messaging platform that allows customers to communicate with service reps in real time. It’s an excellent way for businesses to interact with their website visitors, without having them call or email you. Here’s how the solution looks when seamlessly integrated into a website.

Why personalized CX matters in the 21st century

Personalization is central to engaging and converting customers in the current marketing landscape. Your messages need to resonate with your user base and to be tailored to their interests, behavior, and preferences. If you sustain your CX quality, customers will reward you with repeat purchases and brand loyalty.  

Now that we’ve established the case for using live chat for implementing personalized CX, here are some proven ways of using live chat to improve customer engagement and satisfaction.   

Guide to personalizing digital CX with live chat software

1. Capitalize on the convenience factor 

Modern-day customers know and love messaging. Your live chat tool should build on this convenience and familiarity to offer a consistent experience. You should adopt a system that lets your customers map their queries to the right team and has a great product interface on the business side. It’s equally vital for your support staff to view all conversations in a single dashboard to prioritize their duties and respond efficiently.  

Takeaway: Focus on ease-of-use and explore how to break down the wall between your business and your target audience. 

2. Be available to your customers 

Shopping cart abandonment is a common practice in the e-commerce sphere and you can reduce such instances by using a chatbot on your site. The bot will remind customers about the items in their cart, directing them to the checkout page.  

This way chatbots can address simple queries and your support agents can come to the rescue for complex questions making you available 24×7 to solve any issue that makes buyers leave you midway.  

Takeaway: Integrate chatbots with live chat features to drive faster checkouts and increased sales. 

3. Amplify customer support functions 

Research indicates that tech-savvy consumers expect a response within 10 minutes. Live chat software is a unique way of enabling quick answers, delivering fulfilling CX, and making your customers return for more. 

Having in-app messaging can help you handle onboarding queries, quickly resolve queries, educate users about core features and give them access to self-help guides, video tutorials, FAQs, etc., to find answers at their own pace.  

 Takeaway: Augment user experience and engagement via instant responses and self-help resources. 

4. Highlight suitable product offerings 

The magic of marketing lies in getting the right products in front of the right customers and history tracking helps you achieve that. With live chat you can preserve past chat interactions and add notes in threads, providing context to your salespersons and support staff. This way agents can see the backdrop of the brand-consumer relationship and continue from there. Customers don’t need to repeat themselves, and your agents can focus on closing sales and delivering positive experiences.  

Takeaway: Track conversations and purchase history to make the customer journey more purpose-compatible.  

5. Maximize team productivity  

Live chat adoption can prove useful to your customer service model as well. Your agents can manage chat requests better during volume spikes and review conversational metrics to make data-driven decisions.  

We recommend using the visual dashboards of your live chat software for business to track response times, customer satisfaction ratings, conversion rates, and agent performance. These insights will help you align your teams and maintain your CX quality. As the analytics and reports are visible across the organization, decisions are not isolated to siloed company divisions. Consequently, this fosters a more collaborative and informed decision-making process.

Takeaway:  Monitor performance and use conversational metrics to boost customer success.  

6. Enable co-browsing and humanize chat experience  

Let’s face it – 21st-century consumers detest waiting. So, you need to speed up response time and reduce the number of support touchpoints. You can unify your business communications by connecting your live chat system with widely-used messaging apps, viz. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, and Apple Business Chat.  

Live chat takes the messaging beyond the robotic experience by bringing a human touch to customer interactions. You can easily integrate your software with other platforms, have face-to-face video calls, and provide resolutions on the first contact. Thus, it’s no surprise that live chat enjoys higher customer satisfaction ratings than email, social media, and phone.  

Takeaway: Clear the clutter and integrate your live chat system with other platforms for uninterrupted CX. 

We conclude by noting that live chat software proves immensely valuable in generating quality leads, navigating shoppers to purchase, increasing engagement, and getting better insights. The above steps on using the technology will make you a personalization pro! 

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: A New Way To Take Care Of Your Customers: Autonomous Customer Service