Waking up in the middle of the night – the heart is pounding, hands are shaking, and you’re all sweaty. You don’t know what has happened yet, but you look around and then all of a sudden everything is clear – you had a nightmare.
We’ve all been there. Nightmares are something that most of us wish to be able to skip, but they happen beyond our control. It is okay when they happen while you’re asleep. When you’re sleeping you can wake up, but if you’re not sleeping, what do you do?
What is supposed to be a sweet dream
There comes a day in which you need the help from a customer support agent. This is something that should go easy and smooth. Sometimes, however, it is possible that this process turns into a total nightmare.
We are all the same – if something goes wrong, we want it fixed right away. When we do need to contact the customer service department, we want it to take as little time as possible. Unfortunately, we all know it sometimes takes a while before you find a way to get in touch with the company. This can already put you off when it takes you too long to find contact information.
If you manage to find the information, often there are a few options to contact the customer service department – contact form, email or phone.
Tension’s growing as you go
You decide to give the contact form a try. It means you need to spend some time filling in all the fields required. If everything is working properly, that’s great, but it might happen that you have written everything down, you have filled all the information needed and when you click “send” you get an error. Nothing is saved; you need to write everything all over again.
Contacting companies through email brings in other issues. First of all, it means you need to leave the website and open your email. A first act that already feels unnecessary. When you manage to send your message you hope that in a few hours you will receive a reply with a proper solution.
If you are lucky enough, in a few minutes or hours you might receive an email saying that the team is looking into your case. They will do their best to resolve it as soon as possible, but it can take up to 48 hours. However, you need your answer now, you can not wait for 48 hours. Time is the main reason people are drawing back from email more and more.
Time to wake up
As a last resort of trying to get help faster, you try the phone number. However, calling brings some other issues. Most phone companies are onlya vailable by phone during office hours, and you ‘re also dealing with your own working hours. But let’s assume you find a way and you dial the number… The line is busy. You try again – it’s busy again. You try a few more times while the tension escalates and finally you get a signal: “All operators are currently busy, please wait.”. It goes on like this for about 20 minutes.
When your phone call is answered you may still get the “your case is forwarded to the correct department. Once they have more information they will get back to you via email”. Now you really think it’s time to wake up. You just can’t take it anymore. So you sit in your bed all sweaty and shaky, trying to understand what had just happened.
Turn the nightmare into a sweet dream
This, of course, is maybe the worst-case scenario. Usually, it’s not all that bad and you don’t have to wait that long for your case to be resolved. There are, however, many cases where people go through similar plots every day. And guess what, if your customers are going through this on a regular basis, you should be worried about losing them.
Your customer service team can still be a great team and they can do a hell of a job, but customers are demanding faster replies and better service these days. And while all of the channels have their qualities and utility, there are customer service channels on the rise that provide an extra service that traditional channels don’t. Adding a live chat channel, for example, can lower your amount of bad customer experiences.
How can this become a sweet dream?
There are many ways that live chat can help you and your customers at the same time. Here are a few of them:
- It is fast – This is one of the main reasons to use live chat. Time is important to all of us. With live chat, customers can receive a reply within a few seconds. Their case can be resolved within a few minutes. Quick and effective.
- It is convenient – Live chat can be reached at any time of the day. It doesn’t matter if you are at work, on your break, at the store or about to go to bed. This channel is accessible 24/7 and even if someone thought of a question while sleeping, they can contact you via live chat and get the info they need.
- It is qualitative– Say goodbye to bad lines or the inability to understand different accents. Reading is often a lot easier to understand than listening. Especially considering the fact that people can read the message again. Live chat gives the opportunity for better understanding and therefore – helping the customer better and faster.
- It is user friendly – Customers can chat with you while searching the website. Plus, it’s completely anonymous. This highly increases the satisfaction of customers when contacting you.
- Staffing – More great news – one live chat operator can handle up to 6 customers at the same time. This means you need fewer people to handle more customers. They are not only helping their colleagues on email and phone, but they are helping you reduce costs.
Wake up well-rested
Customers get the immediate access they need to the company. They also get an immediate reply to their questions. Imagine if the entire fret from the case above was just about a simple question. The customer was going to be able to receive the answer within a few minutes, not needing to fill in all kinds of unnecessary information or waiting for 48 hours. It applies to many cases, which can be resolved on the spot via live chat.
This way, nor customers nor your customer service team will waste that much time and energy. Your team will have more time to help more customers and the customer satisfaction level will automatically rise. Not only you will be able to sleep tight, but your customers too.