Question that is most frequently asked as your business grows is when should you invest in chat support for your customers.
There isn’t really a good enough answer for this. Every side will probably have good enough arguments to justify their points meanwhile other side will disagree.
Through this blog post we’ll go over AI chatbots, knowledge base as well as great tips how your chat support should work and look as well as when should you increase your chat support force but also question which type of chat support force do you really need to get recognized as a healthy business.
Table of Contents
Chatbots and automations
Rundown on Chatbots in chat support
Chatbots are great to be used in small, medium and large businesses as you can offer quick and simple support; ideal use case for chatbots is to un-burden support agents of simple, easily found solutions so they can focus on more complex queries.
Majority of the businesses from early launch of GPT started using chatbots alongside with knowledge base.
So, you might be wondering, if I use a chatbot I will save on labor costs as well as have a virtual agent online at all time to answer all concerns.
Correct!
While AI has tremendously scaled since first released to the public it still has certain flaws which can be challenging to manage.
While using chatbot as primary entry in your chat support seems like a great option, here’s a few thoughts which you should pay attention to:
You might be wondering why any of this matters?
If you’re having customer base and let’s say on average each day around X support queries are being raised, in a month that would be X chat support tickets or queries. Good math, huh?
Many if not all chatbot subscription services bill you per chatbot and per number of messages sent each month. More chat support messages, higher package you would need to choose and therefore; bigger bill to cover.
I think it’s safe to say you probably won’t spend more than $400 a month if you select the highest package they have, yet again; I’m assuming the number of tickets which you would have per month.
For example, chatlab.com Platinum package costs $360 a month, where you have 50.000 messages and 25 chatbots.
There’s also an alternative where billing is being calculated on your monthly active chats which may be a better approach if you have longer conversations with each client.
LiveChat is probably the most popular solution which over 30.000 companies use, however; not suitable for everyone’s budget.
Each of those softwares will give you what you’re looking for, you want to be available at all times across the whole planet. Each of those softwares will make that goal accomplished.
So in reality, having a chatbot definitely saves your budget compared to hiring chat support agents; however in most cases when it comes to complaints and refunds you would always need human chat support otherwise you’ll leave your customers frustrated that they can not get to a human to speak about their issue with the order.
Here’s what you gain by having an chatbot:
Four points above is ideal scenario to have exceptional relationship with any customer.
Now, the dark sides.
For both there are more points if you’d like to drill in depths. I mainly want you to understand that using a chatbot is phenomenal if you have a Knowledge base, Over 500 active customers and a lot of repetitive questions by customers.
Here’s what most popular live chat software says:
USE CHATBOT FOR ROUTINE TASKS.
LET AGENTS FOCUS ON COMPLEX CASES.
You shouldn’t rely on having chatbots as your one and only chat support tier, We’re human and it won’t take us long to get frustrated by a machine who keeps apologizing without actually meaning it or helping resolve it.
Let’s move to Knowledge base.
How can you leverage Knowledge Base
Knowledge base is usually required for every business which acts as SaaS of any kind or selling any subscription based services which have user accounts.
It’s a great way to present most recent questions by turning them into articles. Many big businesses like Monday CRM, ClickUp and others use knowledge base documentation to answer big chunk of questions before they are even asked.
From an agent’s perspective as human we often get tired to answer the same groups of questions over an over again, fair, build articles out of most asked chat support questions and use chatbots to answer those questions by redirecting clients to your knowledge base. There are numerous apps which can help you with this.
Top of the mind would be Knowledge Base which partnered with Live Chat so you can grab 2 in 1 benefit. if you’re looking for a free alternative, you can always use Notion, here’s a blog on how to build a knowledge base documentation.
Note: Keep in mind that if you use Notion you would need to find a chatbot which will redirect users depending on the question they have to either your knowledge page in general or specific page within.
This will probably require some chatbot training in order to tie certain words with certain pages you’ve made for those questions exclusively.
If you are looking for a reliable live chat support system which you can at first run then later once you have enough information leverage chatbots and knowledge, feel free to check out tawk.to.
They’ve been on the market since forever and it’s totally free to use their live chat support tool, they have paid packages which you can take a look at a later date once you have a more established chat support.
Always have Connect to Agent visible ( if none, you be one )
More often than not, chatbots act smart when in reality they provoke frustration in your customers.
When it comes to complex query chatbots are not very reliable, if I have to explain how my Email DNS is not working for X, Y and Z, it’s extremely rare that a chatbot will provide a solution rather I would need a human to explain my issue to.
Always in your live chat have an option to connect to a human agent, do not let your customers go through frustration where your agent would later need to apologize before real query even gets asked.
We’re all in the business of helping someone start or fix something. AI being on it’s rise will get more and more involved into our daily actions therefore; it’s crucial some aspects remain in human authority otherwise business will lose customers to those who are still providing human chat support.
Many websites do not have a clear “Connect to an agent” button therefore you can leverage this keyword, it should work in 7/10 cases.
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Live Chat Options
If possible implement all needed feature a customer using live chat support would require. Use popular websites and their style of live chat, options they have are probably most needed ones.
I absolutely love to have an option to send a transcript to myself as I often tend to forget what agent said. In majority of the cases pretty much like 95% of chats this is automated.
If you do not see send transcript 9/10 cases you will receive it straight to your email after conversation has been ended.
Options you see on the image above are ones on tawk.to website, pretty sure if you integrate their solution you can have the same ones; and possibly even more depending on what do you need.
As an example, here’s one of my own chats from another website.
As you can see no chat options are visible, yet each response I receive if I’m not active on their website I will receive on an email right away.
Far as I’ve seen so far, I haven’t asked but I’m not entirely sure I do receive a complete chat transcription to my email as technically I’m always in the chat.
I’m able to scroll up to my first ever message I sent to support team.
Also, I’ve blurred chat info as I have not asked for permission to present the same, names, urls and other are included.
As a bonus etiquette tip, if you have not asked for permission, hide it. It doesn’t matter if you are promoting it for mutual benefit or individual, if permission was not written do not expose your own or anybody’s info.
If you’re wondering why does that matter. Crawler bots are getting better every day, it’s only a matter of time before they start reading information on images, therefore protect yourself and protect others at all times.
Always have visible live chat bubble
I can not stress enough that if you have a live chat option, always keep that bubble visible on the page.
Some website have live chat option, however; you are required to click “Chat” in the footer in order for that chat to open up.
Here’s what recognizable chat bubble looks like
Don’t guess the patience.
Some days ago I had a very interesting talk with an agent from hosting software company. I was exploring a possible relocation from my current host to a cloud based hosting and I came across this company which does indeed have live chat, however; not the fastest one.
At the time I was first speaking with another agent who was fast, later I was speaking with a different one which took a bit before giving a reply, after both conversations I would still rate the support 10/10. Why?
Human touch will never be beaten by an AI and it’s fast responses. Even though an agent can take a bit to reply, when I talked with the agent it felt like I was talking with a friend over coffee, at no point did it feel like I couldn’t ask anything and get a genuine reply back.
They take proud in having human support consisting out of engineers only therefore they can provide the most accurate information instead of outsourcing cheap labor chat support agents which would reply: “I would need to check with dev team” and so it would go in circles.
While you think your customers can not always wait, in certain cases especially when it comes to technologies and setting up softwares customers are willing to wait as they now you will solve their concern, meanwhile chat bots will guide them through a wild goose chase.
If you’re thinking, that’s where knowledge base comes in, sure, however; not all queries can be placed into a knowledge base.
When it comes to websites and hosting, there’s always certain edge cases as well as questions which are specific to certain niches or many of them.
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By research, customers aka your clients love emotion. They love to be heard, and how could they not.
You might be selling a luxurious pair of shoes for $500 and the only way your client can get back to you is through an email?
Let’s talk a bit about this.
Just a moment ago I was exploring to purchase a CRM system which would solve a couple of challenges I’m looking into right now, but they do not have a live chat support available, strictly work through emails.
While I understand the difficulties and challenges a business has to have in order to entertain a live chat, I am well aware that you do not need to hire people to provide chat support yourself.
Often we require an answer and we need it in timely manner, reality is if we don’t get it at the time we’re looking to engage, it’s a low percentage we’ll need it tomorrow or later that same day.
Of course, it depends on necessity, keep in mind that necessity is provided by number of companies and that you are not the only one, most likely not even in your area nevertheless city.
At Maypact, we offer Email, Phone and WhatsApp contact.
All is linked to my personal phone and email. We do not outsource any cheap labor or have any chatbots to answer any of our client requests or questions, both existing and ones looking to become one.
We take extreme pride in providing 100% human conversations. I dislike being handed off to a bot, therefore; I will not put anyone through that experience nor will anyone from my team.
We can afford this approach as we work with selected clientele, all our projects are tailored for each of our clients therefore we deal with specific concerns.
Allow customers to rate your service
Some are grateful for this some are not, however; whether good or bad we like leaving a review. In my case I always try to leave both good and improvement needed review.
I’m pretty sure customers tend to leave bad reviews always when not happy and not as frequent to leave a good review when they are happy with the service.
In any case, it’s your duty to let your customers express their satisfaction.
I just finished my conversation with an agent from LiveChat software and here’s a most common end of conversation I like to see.
Using an example above, it’s always a great tactic to use in order to receive feedback how are your chat support agents managing your clients.
Be aware that sometimes it might be at customer’s fault if something goes wrong and do not take these reviews always at 100% as your agents have been hand picked, they are trained and educated on the manner.
That is if you’re not outsourcing chat support agents rather have in house team that handles all complex queries. They are trained and ready to resolve the issue; therefore always provide benefit of the doubt.
If nothing, that’s why transcript exist, to verify professionalism and steps your agent took to resolve an issue for your customer.
Challenge we’re facing for chat support
We’re debating to open our own support website which will handle support for all our clients and businesses looking to explore our solutions before they schedule a meeting with us.
We’ll always use primarily us, as the only layer for support, as we value our clients and we truly want to provide the best we can for them. Reality is, we can not provide that at any given moment.
While we handle majority of the EU times, we do lack in certain time zones, therefore clients form across the seas would need to “wait” before we get back to them.
How do we solve this?
We simply refuse to outsource labor force based in Central America, Asia or other continents to battle this issue as our system and how we work requires a truly dedicated individual to comply with our agency goals.
We certainly won’t find comfort in getting a handful of chat bots as we need humans.
If you know someone whose educated in following branches:
Forward them my email stax@maypact.com so we can get in touch with them directly. First deal that your connection provides for Maypact we’ll gladly forward a fair commission to you directly.
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Conclusion, I guess?
While chat support is extremely important in any business niche, how you want to treat your customers take precedence.
You can hire 500 chat support bots and agents, if you can not equip them with real insight how you want them to handle your clients and customers, don’t expect them too.
Reality is we get paid we do the job. To perform the job correctly we need guidance and on-boarding, if none exists, we can not provide the best chat support on the market.
Educate your team. Make a plan yourself then move on to building your support for customers.
It’s desirable to know how you will approach this before starting a low to heavy traffic business as faster you scale it’ll be harder and harder to keep up with foundation your business was build upon.
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