Live Chat: The Difference Between Good and Great Customer Service
Posted by Max Baun on Tue, Aug 19, 2008 @ 10:56 AM
You’re on the phone with a company and they put you on hold
for countless minutes. In frustration, you hang up and your question goes
unanswered. Next you decide to email the customer service department. It takes
them a week to respond in which they say you will have to call and speak with a
representative.
You finally give up trying to find an answer and start
sharing the awful experience you had with that company. The company’s reputation
is getting worse because people keep sharing the poor experience they had with the
customer service. What can companies do to ensure customer satisfaction and
answer all legitimate questions in a quick and efficient manner?
One very simple tool can be added to all business websites
to increase the quality of their customer service. It’s called Live Chat. Live
Chat is essentially an instant messaging tool that allows one customer service
representative to deal with multiple customers at one time. People will not be
put on hold for ages waiting for the next available representative. In reality,
a small business could have one customer service representative to answer all
of the questions on their Live Chat system.
On the customers end, they can ask small questions about
products or services without having to wait days for an email response.
Customers can send links and images to the representative to visually explain
their problem or need. Through Live Chat, representatives can link customers
directly to the needed
product or service on their website. This way, customers
won’t spend hours searching a website trying to figure out if the product will
work for them.
A couple months ago I needed to buy a whole new fog light
for my car. I went onto an auto parts website, put in my car information, and found
multiple options for the housing and multiple options for the lamp socket. Not
wanting to buy the wrong product, I decided to contact their customer service,
but I really didn’t want to spend the time on the phone or waiting for someone
to reply to an email. Luckily I noticed the link for a Live Chat customer
service. After opening the chat window, I was kindly greeted by a
representative to see how they could help me. I explained my problem to her and
she quickly sent me a link to both the parts I needed, explaining that this
will fit my needs the best. I would have never found this product by searching
the website.
The whole process took under ten minutes to figure out what
fit my needs the best and to place the order. I received the box of parts and
it fit in perfectly to my existing setup. The great part about it was that there
was no cost to use the Live Chat. I had never used the service before that, but
now, I fully recommend Live Chat to anyone in need of quick and quality help.
After seeing this form of customer service, I would wholly recommend
it to every ecommerce business. In this day an age, industries are being
saturated with competition. With Live Chat, you can stand out as the leader in
personalized and quality customer service.
NEDS does not currently offer Live Chat, but will be incorporating it in the near future.