Customer service and business reputation are interchangeable in this day and age. It’s often the most crucial interaction a customer will have with your brand, so it’s vital to get it right. As the saying goes, trust is as hard to gain as it is easy to lose.
One great way to ensure your customer service strategy will satisfy your customers every time is to implement a chat solution for your business. With live chat, customers can instantly connect with your team and get questions answered or problems solved.
But with many different chat solutions available, how do you choose the right one for your business? To help you make an educated decision, here are some key features we suggest you look for when selecting a business chat solution.
7 Features Your Business Chat Solution Needs
Scalability
When sorting through business chat solutions, consider how each option will scale. With luck (and good customer service), your business will continue to grow and expand, and you want to make sure you’re adding tools to your organization that can grow and expand with you. Nobody wants to be hindered by limited capacity. That’s why it’s important to look for a solution with flexible customer pricing plans. Flexible plans will allow you to quickly add additional agents and/or expand your customer service capabilities as your business grows.
Integration
Many businesses utilize a suite of different platforms. Because of this, you need a live chat platform that integrates with your current tools and processes such as your CRM, website, social media, etc. This will allow you to streamline processes across multiple channels and trigger chat-based prompts based on customer behavior.
If you have very specific workflows or processes you want to integrate into your chat solution, you might also think you need custom API integration capabilities. However, Acquire offers customizable workflows without engineering support through the use of business rules.
Security & Compliance
The security of your customer data should always be top-of-mind when implementing a chat option. Just as poor customer service puts your brand’s reputation at stake so can data breaches. In fact, according to a recent Forbes study, over 46% of businesses have suffered reputational damages due to security breaches. That’s why it’s imperative that the solution offer security and compliance features like:
- End-to-end encryption: This will ensure secure data transfer between customers and agents.
- Data privacy compliance requirements: Depending on your business’s industry and location, you’ll need a chat solution that can adhere to the same legal obligations as your business such as being GDPR or CCPA compliant.
- Data and access control: Control over which personnel can access data and how long the data is stored can help eliminate security risks.
User-Friendliness
User experience is essential to your success with chat both from a customer and agent perspective.
For customer use, some key user-friendly functions should include:
- An easy-to-find chat feature with clear instructions on how to start a chat, send a message, end a chat, and more.
- A simple and intuitive interface that isn’t cluttered with options and is optimized for both desktop and mobile use.
For agent use, some key user-friendly functions should include:
- A unified agent view to handle multiple conversations across different channels at the same time.
- An easy way to track analytics for efficiency, response, and resolution times.
Reporting & Analytics
Reporting and analytics can provide powerful insights into your customer wants and needs when it comes to support, but it can also help you improve your business performance. Some key metrics that you might want to track could include:
- Response time
- Conversation volume
- Customer satisfaction ratings
- Most asked questions
- Chatbot performance
With good customer experience technology, you can see which channels and agents are providing the best results so you know where to focus efforts and grow your team. For example, if you are tracking agent response times and notice that they have gotten longer over time, you might need to hire more agents to assist with customer support.
Customer Support
While you’re obviously on the hunt for a chat solution to improve your own customer support, you’ll want to make sure you can get the same customer service. Consider the customer support resources available when picking out a solution: Do they have good help documentation, video tutorials, community resources, etc.? What does onboarding look like? Does the solution require coding and engineering resources or can it be implemented without those? Choosing a good business chat solution is more than just finding a good software, it’s about choosing the best partner to help you serve your customers every step of the way.
How Will Customer Support Chat Help Your Business?
Research shows that 79% of customers prefer to use a real-time messaging service for customer service conversations. By not providing chat support, you’re leaving customers with less desirable ways to reach out to you which may result in a poorer customer experience.
Live chat solves a problem connected with more traditional customer service options like emails and phone calls - it's fast. It can take an agent a few days to work through their inbox and business phone calls are often limited to business hours and can only be answered one at a time.
Chat opens the door to automated possibilities, allowing for a 24/7 customer service response and the ability to handle multiple questions at a time despite how many people are on the clock. A trained chatbot can answer the most basic questions while live agents can tackle more nuanced questions.
The Business Chat Solution for Connected Conversations
Ready to take your customer support chat to the next level? Acquire's live messaging solution has all the features you need to streamline your customer service operations and delight your customers. With integrations for popular platforms, enterprise-grade security, and advanced reporting and analytics, Acquire makes it easy to provide fast, personalized support to your customers.
And with our 24/7 customer support team and personalized onboarding, you'll have all the resources you need to succeed. Ready to see Acquire in action? Contact us today to schedule a demo!
