The Ultimate Guide to Live Chat Support

Great customer experience is about meeting people where they already are, and our comprehensive live chat guide is here to help you do just that.

Over the years, we have consistently emphasized our core customer messaging philosophy: send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, to the right place. And today, there is a channel where more potential customers are found than anywhere else: live chat.

Think about how you talk to people every day. You probably use iMessage and WhatsApp with family and friends, and spend more time chatting with co-workers on Slack than in person (especially these days). And because we talk to people via messenger all day, customers expect to be able to talk to businesses that way, too.

Companies are realizing there is a better way to do business and have started using live chat messaging to build lasting relationships with their customers across the spectrum of support, sales and marketing . Plus, they see tangible ROI:

With live chat in sales, support, and marketing, Living Spaces handles over 8,000 conversations weekly with an average first response time of less than a minute. By using live chat software instead of email and phone support, tado° saw a 92% decrease in first response time. Using custom bots to handle a 179% increase in incoming conversations, Guru easily handles 900 monthly conversations, while maintaining a 95% CSAT score. Using Intercom Messenger, Qonto has reduced median first response time to just two minutes while saving over 1,000 hours of team time each quarter.

So how can your business adapt to this change and start engaging with customers at key times? The solution is simple: install live chat on your website and start having conversations with people where they are.

With that in mind, we've put together this comprehensive guide to help you understand how to make live chat work for you and your business.

What is Live Chat?

Live chat is a messaging channel that allows existing and potential customers to talk to your business in real time through your website or app. By combining your live chat platform with other features, such as automation and bots, you can give customers immediate answers to their queries, gain important context about their use cases, and route more complex messages to the right teams. Ultimately, live chat helps businesses build more personal and direct relationships with their customers.

"The history of customer experience these days is synchronous"

As HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan told us:

"People live in Slack, they live in messenger. Email is on a very slow death march - it's still a very useful tool, but the modern worker doesn't appreciate it and doesn't doesn't want to communicate that way. The problem with email is that it's asynchronous. I think the story of customer experience these days is synchronous."

Unfortunately, traditional live chat software is often still steeped in old-school customer support methods. In such cases, customers are forced to adhere to a queuing mentality where they are treated like a ticket number, not a human being. Not only that, but your team's time is spent answering simple, repetitive questions as quickly as possible, while more complex or time-sensitive requests are left pending, even if they have a higher priority.

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