Live chat
Add live chat support to your customer experience toolkit with RingCentral RingCX. Make it quick and easy for customers to reach out while they’re on your site, and help to keep them there. Live chat is one of 20+ channels your agents can manage, all via one intuitive interface.
Offering the best possible customer experience is a vital differentiator for consumer-facing businesses. To do that, you need to meet customers where they are and make reaching out for support as seamless as possible. Introducing live chat to your website or app is an effective way to do so.
It doesn’t have to be difficult, either. RingCentral RingCX is an omnichannel customer engagement platform that puts live chat and a whole lot more at your fingertips. Your agents can manage customer interactions across 20+ channels, including live chat, on one streamlined interface, and deliver the kind of CX that keeps your customers around.
Understanding chat support software: What are live chat services?
Live chat is a tool that’s used to offer synchronized online chat support to website visitors via messaging. The software that facilitates these interactions is commonly referred to as live chat support software or customer support chat software.
When someone visits your website, a handy chat window or chat widget pops up to start a live chat session. The visitor types their message in the chatbox, and they receive an immediate response. Through live chat conversations, businesses can initiate contact with website visitors, provide customer support, or interact with returning customers.
Web chat services can be used by marketing, customer support, and sales teams to enhance communications across the customer’s journey. It enables businesses to provide:
- Enhanced synchronized support
- More personalized customer experience with custom welcome messages and more
- Better brand interactions.
Live chat vs chatbots: What’s the difference?
Live chat software for customer support isn’t the same as a chatbot but the two play similar roles. Customer service chat software connects your human agents with customers via a chat widget or interface.
A chatbot, meanwhile, is an artificial intelligence automated chat solution that can harness machine learning alongside natural language processing to communicate in a human-like manner.
Their purpose is to automate certain responses, and they provide businesses with a cost-effective solution for staying on top of customer demands and streamlining support processes.
They’re transforming customer service and sales industries. Some of their benefits include:
- 24/7 support
- Cut down on operational costs
- Monitor customer data and provide better insights
- Easy to implement
- Automate repetitive tasks to free up agents to focus on more important ones
Bots are becoming increasingly intelligent, and it can be difficult to tell the difference between a chatbot and a live chat representative. That’s particularly true in the case of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs). These are the most evolved and intelligent form of chatbots, and can handle increasingly complex interactions.
However, they still lack the emotional intelligence of real live agents. For this reason, chatbots or IVAs and customer service live chat software work best when they’re implemented in tandem.
Live chat software features built in to RingCX
RingCentral RingCX is a holistic customer engagement platform. It positions you to meet customers where they are effectively, by bringing together more than 20 communication channels on one intuitive platform. That includes providing live chat software solutions built right in.
Handle live chats via a streamlined interface
Your agents can view, manage, and participate in live chat interactions via their agent interface. That makes it easy for them to offer the real-time support your customers demand. What’s more, these interactions are in the same place as SMS and other conversations. So, no more time wasted app-hopping.
Boost efficiency with AI-powered features
RingCX and its built-in AI also makes it easier to boost the efficiency of your live chat agents. You can build a library of pre-created responses to speed up conversations. Plus, AI Agent Assist can draw information from knowledge bases and other sources to guide agents to the best responses.
More effective management and analytics
Using RingCX as your live chat tool also makes managing, monitoring, and improving performance simpler. A single supervisor interface means your managers can stay across ongoing live chats and other digital interactions with ease. What’s more, unified reporting and dashboards make it a cinch to track and analyze digital performance.
More than just the best live chat software
As well as all the features of the best live chat software for small business and enterprises alike, RingCX also helps you offer better CX across the board. The comprehensive platform combines:
True omnichannel capabilities
In today’s digital world, businesses must be able to connect with customers and provide a seamless user experience across a range of traditional and digital channels. RingCX makes it easy for prospects and customers to reach out to customer service teams via:
- Inbound voice calls
- Asynchronous web mobile and messaging apps
- Social media
- Live chat
- In-app message
Although people are increasingly finding support over live chat help desks, messaging, and social media, phone support is still a popular method. With RingCX, you can improve the customer service experience with phone support tools like IVR, smart call routing, and more.
Integrations with your other tools
App integration with other systems and software is vital when choosing customer service software. Native RingCentral integrations allow you to connect your customer service data to various other apps and tools like:
- Internal communications tools for your teams
- Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms
- Social tools
- Productivity platforms
By integrating customer service with these other platforms, support teams can ensure they always have the right information and context to handle support ticketing requests efficiently.
Why introduce live chat for your website?
Live chat allows customers to get quick, convenient solutions to their questions and problems. It can increase conversions and drive engagement by providing that streamlined, efficient support. In short, website live chat software is a valuable tool that enables businesses to:
Reduce service costs
Live chat is much cheaper than a phone call, which is why it’s the ideal tool for reducing operational business costs. Minimized resolution time means agents spend less time dealing with support requests.
They can also support multiple customers and handle more than one interaction at the same time. This means significant cost savings for businesses as they can rely on fewer agents to provide customer support. What’s more, smart routing ensures that the ticketing system directs requests to the right agents every time.
Boost agent efficiency and productivity
Live chat has reformed traditional call center processes. With web live chat software, agents can respond faster and provide efficient synchronized answers to customers and site visitors. Empowering agents with live chat enables them to:
- Keep answers short and offer quick solutions with visual aids (through co-browsing and file sharing)
- Save time by using canned responses to answer common queries
- Engage in multiple conversations at the same time and chat with your customers based on priority
- Deploy chatbots to handle simple inquiries, allowing human agents to deal with more complex support requests.
Optimize conversions
Live chat software for websites helps increase conversion rates by ensuring visitors don’t have to navigate away from your site to get in contact. With support staff immediately available to answer any questions, visitors are more likely to convert as they find information and solve problems before they put off a purchase.
Prevent cart abandonment
There are lots of different reasons a customer might abandon their shopping cart before check-out. If a customer isn’t sure their credit card will be accepted, for instance, they might abandon the cart to re-assess their funds. Or perhaps they can’t locate the shipping costs immediately, they might become frustrated and try their luck with another website.
Live chat reduces cart abandonment rates by showing customers that someone is available to answer their questions throughout their experience with your business. This reinforces transparency between brands and customers, and helps to build trust in online businesses.
Provide context to customers
The best live chat services for websites allow you to share files, images, gifs, and videos with customers. This can’t be done via phone call. And, unlike email, live chat provides more context that can help customers find solutions more efficiently.
For instance, if a customer is contacting a support agent with a request about a product’s functionality, the agent can link the customer to a product demo video that demonstrates how to use it visually.
Collect customer data
Live chat can collect customer data that can be analyzed and used to improve the customer service experience. This involves:
- Analyzing support request messaging transcripts
- Feeding customer data into your CRM to provide 360-degree views of your customers
- Determining common questions that help you to pinpoint gaps in your website and support content resources
- Building better relationships with customer profiles that enable agents to personalize customer messaging.
Increase customer satisfaction
Live chat provides customers with synchronized support that’s often preferred over talking to strangers on the phone. It solves many customer frustrations that are felt through traditional phone-based support channels like high costs, long response times, and asynchronous communications.
Some of the ways live chat improves satisfaction rates among customers include:
- It increases first contact resolution by enabling customers to find an immediate answer to their concerns
- It’s inclusive, particularly for the hearing-impaired, making it an accessible way to contact service teams
- It’s device-friendly and allows customers to seek help from desktops or mobile apps in a way that’s convenient for them.
Track agent performance and success
Live chat services for websites often offer analytics that enable organizations to easily track KPIs that align with their business goals. Whatever matters most to your business, whether it’s improving satisfaction rates or increasing conversions, empowering agents with a live chat tool will deliver measurable results. What’s more, data insights can be used to provide feedback to agents and inform customer service strategies.
Live chat FAQs
- Proactive chat: The live chat system initiates conversations by reaching out to website visitors and offering immediate help.
- Canned responses: Companies can create libraries of responses to common questions that agents can use for a more efficient response time.
- Visitor tracking and insights: This feature provides insights into visitor behavior by tracking information like time spent in chat sessions and customer activity.
- Chat routing: Chats are transferred to available operators with skills-based routing, to ensure customers are matched with the right agents.
- Operator and chat monitoring: Managers can supervise operators to evaluate their overall performance and target points that require further training and improvement.
- Offline forms: If your agents aren’t online 24/7, chat forms allow customers to reach out with their questions and problems at any time of the day.
- File sharing: Agents can drag and drop files like screenshots, offers, and catalogs to share in chats, providing further support for customers.
- Reports and analytics: Monitor operator activities, chat histories, conversations, and average handle times for chats.
- Pay-per-agent solution: These solutions offer pricing that’s dependent on the number of agents who use it.
- Volume-based pricing: Similar to pay-per-agent models, volume-based priced solutions are based on your website traffic.
- Pay-per-lead: These solutions bill clients based on their performance. In this way, you pay for the number of leads that are captured via live chat.