The Advantages of Live Chat Over Voice Support

Customer service channels have improved and diversified over the last decade, providing service providers and customers better and more effective ways to communicate with each other.

Live chat support, in particular, has radically evolved in the last few years.

Thanks to our much-improved technology, talking to customer service professionals has never been more satisfying and more efficient.

That’s not to say that voice support is going anywhere soon. When push comes to shove, there are still plenty of customers who prefer hearing a live human voice when asking for assistance.

Still, no one can deny that chat support is now the most-preferred customer engagement channel over voice support — at least if this Zendesk study is any indication.

Curious to know the reasons why? We’ve got you covered.

1. Allows you to handle multiple customers at a time

Regarding efficiency, live chat support beats voice support many times over. For one, it allows each agent to communicate with more than one customer at a time.

Obviously, agents can’t do the same when communicating with a customer over the phone. With chat support, it’s as easy as opening another chat window.

Also, new chat technology has a wide range of customization tools that allow your call center customer service agents to manage multiple sessions better.

2. Provides real-time, remote assistance

Chat support provides agents the tools needed to guide customers through step-by-step instructions. Thanks to screen sharing/remote desktop features, agents can take control of customers’ desktops and be able to assist them accordingly.

This way, customers won’t have a difficult time understanding the agents’ instructions, and won’t feel powerless due to lack of tech-savviness.

3. Enhances customer experience through visual aids

With live messaging, customer service reps can show customers with visual aids that can help them resolve their issues faster.

Whether it’s a product guide, a graph, or an animated GIF, a visual aid can help customers understand their issues much better.

These visual aids can also be sent to customers after each chat session, allowing them to resolve issues should they recur.

4. It’s cost-efficient

Implementing live messaging is significantly more cost-effective than setting up voice support.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to do away with the latter, but this only emphasizes why you shouldn’t think twice about adding chat support to your customer service channels.

Setting up phone support is expensive. On the other hand, implementing live chat services takes only a few steps.

5. Provides the organization with visitor behavior analysis

A good live chat software comes with features and tools that provide extensive data on customer behavior.

These data, along with relevant customer analytics, can give you actionable insights and identify problem areas that provide opportunities to understand customers better.

Some of the data you can get for every live messaging session include referral links, time spent on site, number of visits, location, operating system and device used, and more.

Conclusion

As a business owner, it’s in your best interests to provide your customer with every available channel for contacting your brand. We are, after all, living in an omnichannel world, not to mention that it enhances the customer journey in more ways than one.

Live chat support is becoming even more popular each year, and you — as well as your customers — will be better served by using it to your advantage like we do at our customer service call center in the Philippines.