In this day and age of viral trends and 24/7 on-line marketplaces greatest issue for startups after the launch is providing customer service. There is no room for error. As American investor and entrepreneur Sam Altman says in his Startup Playbook, “Great customer service creates enthusiastic early users”.
However, poor customer service could be reported without a second thought to your market due via social media platforms, Google Reviews and other publicly-visible Customer Satisfaction Rate ratings. If you’re not cautious this could end up sabotaging your dream project within its beginning days.
What are the reasons to risk all your hard-earned work?
Live chat outsourcing can stop the possibility of a failure in customer service
However, it’s typically when you’ve exhausted your capital for your start-up and don’t have a the chance to make much of it back from the initial investment that you require perfect client service most. Also, you must avoid the dissipation of energy and diverted concentration that could result from spreading your company too thin too soon.
This is why many new businesses are enticed by outsourcing customer support – in addition to their networking or accounting development. Also, the outsourcing of live chat service (which is becoming a vital tool in the customer service toolbox) is an excellent starting point.
Live chat customer support outsourcing to locations outside of the United States like for instance the Philippines has no longer an option to compromise. Utilizing established offshoring firms with high-tech, well-resourced business hubs, and huge, well educated workforce sources, you will be able to establish an even more effective and professional live chat support staff off-shore than you can at home , even if your company is struggling to keep up with the demands from your investment capital.
The idea of spending between $150,000 and 200k a year to hire enough people to run the single body 24 hour live chat schedule is not feasible. However, bringing in staff from different tasks within your company isn’t a great option as well.
What do you mean by Live Chat?
Live chat is an SaaS service that lets site users contact the staff directly in real time.
If you’ve ever noticed the tiny window pop up on the right-hand side of a site’s homepage (possibly with the name of someone and photograph) most likely you saw a chat screen. It may also show up as tiny icons with an audio bubble.
Live chat is rapidly growing in popularity with customers as its usage growing by 400 percent between 2015 and the year the year 2018. In the Comm100’s Live Chat Benchmark Report for 2019 the average satisfaction of customers was higher than 80% in 2018.
What makes chat on the internet so popular?
Live chat allows those who suffer from PTSD caused by phone menus bypass the prompts and receive a quick response. While it’s beneficial to keep live chat support for calls, it can bridge the gap between preference and people of older age who prefer making calls directly, but are unable to keep up with their time and tired of waiting for long periods and confusing menus.
Why outsourcing live chat is so great for startups
Live chat offers many advantages. Many of them are especially useful for small businesses that are under significant time and financial limitations. Here are some tips to assist you in deciding if outsource live chat service can be beneficial for you:
Reduced the time to respond
The reduction of response times is always a part in increasing customer satisfaction. However, it’s so crucial in the present that it’s on the top of the list of priorities.
Live chat is a great way to dramatically reduce the response time.
The average time to respond in live chat is 2 minutes, as opposed up to twelve hours with email, and 10 hours for social media. That’s enough.
Reduce costs through outsourcing
The introduction of live chat into your company will save money. It’s the most effective method of providing customers with direct service in real-time. Customers are less likely to shop with companies that don’t offer it. If you’re a new business you don’t have the luxury of being able to lose that growing portion of customers.
However, outsourcing support for live chat for your business could help you save up to 70% based the platform you select. The benefits of establishing live chat is enhanced more when you form a large skilled and experienced team, and let someone else handle hiring, training and software.
Enhancing customer satisfaction
As we’ve already mentioned live chat can reduce time to respond and allows customers to speak directly to someone anytime of night or day. According to Kayako 41 percent of users prefer live chat over other types of customer support due to the fact that they are able to multitask while they chat.
Zendesk research found that despite the rapid growth of AI support technology 70% of customers prefer human service over AI technology and Forrester going as far to forecast an uproar against AI and other non-human customer support methods.
Enhancing efficiency
Live chat agents with experience are able to handle 3-6 chat conversations at once with the careful use of personalized responses as well as fast links . It’s a huge improvement over traditional telephone customer service.
Accessing a wider pool chat-friendly talent
The abilities required to run a top-quality live chat aren’t easy obtain. The job demands:
- great grammar and spelling (not to mention excellent typing abilities)
- Strong and natural, English
- a warm, intelligent manner
- the capability to hold multiple conversations simultaneously.
The Philippines is among the top places to locate live chat operators. The highly educated and largely bilingual population is known for their polite, friendly and trustworthy.
Quickly identifying repeated problems
Since live chats are written, not spoken, it is an account that both the user and business can save and reference in future interactions. It can also be used as a foundation for future business development. Furthermore, the ability to track performance of CRM software make analysis of data to spot frequent issues a breeze.
Market expansion and expanding reach
Live chat that is available 24/7 can also help extend your market reacheven to other time zones within your country and internationally. (Make sure that you change your shipping policy to allow for this.) 24-hour rosters are among of the greatest benefits that come with outsourcing customer service to an aspiring business – or for any other business.
Customers also tend to recommend to their friends the positive experience they had with live chat and boost your chances of sales via word-of-mouth and social media.
Proactive outreach
In order to make your customer service more proactive than reactive, you have to know your customers’ needs so that you are able to anticipate their needs.
A live chat agent who is empowered can monitor a user’s activities on the website and provide recommendations and tips in response to their previous purchases. This type of proactive intervention can give an impression of being a person of professional customer service and decrease bounces from customers.
Generating data and providing feedback to analytics
One of the greatest advantages outsourcing the live chat service is the information that can be collected from every interaction. Then, you can analyze the data, compare the performance of your product and use it to generate suggestions for improving your service.
Not leastgrowing sales
The live chat service that you provide outsourced does not just increase sales by answering customer queries and issues at the time of purchase, but also appears to boost sales.
Forrester has reported an average of 10% improvement in the amount of the average order for customers who utilized live chat prior to making purchases. Kayako’s Live Chat statistics show that 53% of users believe they are more likely to buy something when live chat is on.
Bad conversation — what to not do
Like every other tool used in business Live chat is a tool that is prone to being misused. This can be detrimental to your reputation and brand. Of the respondents that were interviewed with Forrester in its landmark report Raising the Bar What Gen Z Expectations Are Reshaping Brand Experiences 20 percent from Gen Z respondents Gen Z contingent said that insufficient response time to a chat message can cause them to abandon an organization for the rest of their lives. This generation is set to make up the majority of the market on the internet.
Here’s a brief overview of what people do not like about the live chat experience.
- A live chat window pops up without anyone on the other side. It’s unprofessional, misleading and rude.
- Long wait time. Live chat is expected to be speedy, therefore, they get frustrated more quickly when it’s not.
- Live chat operators don’t have enough information about the product or customer’s background, or have the right tools to aid customers efficiently.
- Insufficient communication skills With live chat employees struggling to understand the issues or present solutions due to their poor English abilities.
- If you are required to fill in forms or enter multiple times personal details before you can begin talking.
- Responses that are too scripted. It’s evident that, and it’s annoying.
The problems could be attributed to not having enough resources or inadequate preparation. These problems are often exacerbated by the person who put the system together, not having enough about the industry this is a frequent problem for startups with no personnel.
It is possible to address this by simply choosing an experienced outsourcing firm for customer service that can provide you with advice on system designs, software tools, and the best person to hire.
Make the plunge
The personalized and top-quality support provided by our skilled, outsourced chat agents is able to:
- boost customer satisfaction and satisfaction with your business
- Increase brand loyalty
- Increase the odds of your startup increasing the number of contacts you convert.
Remember that you can utilize the live chat and other platforms for contact in order to provide your new customers with additional options, including:
- sending follow-up email messages after the chat
- providing them with a transcript of the conversation
- Giving them the opportunity to leave feedback.
