When customer experience directors float the idea of investing more heavily in live chat for customer service, it’s not uncommon for them to get pushback. One of the biggest motivations for such reticence is uncertainty over whether anyone will actually want to use such support channels—and whether investing in them will ultimately prove worth it.
An additional headwind comes from the fact that many CX directors are laboring under the misapprehension that they need an elaborate plan to push customers into a new channel. But one thing we consistently hear from our enterprise customers is that it’s surprising how naturally customers start using a new channel when they realize it exists. To borrow a famous phrase from Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” Or, to paraphrase a bit, “If you build it (and make it easy for them to engage with you), they will come.” You don’t have to create a process that diverts them to the new channel.
The article below fleshes out and defends this claim. We’ll first sketch the big-picture case for why live chat with customers remains as important as ever, then finish with some tips for boosting customer engagement with your live chat service.
Why is Live Chat Important for Contact Centers?
Before we talk about how to get people to use your live chat for customer service features, let’s discuss why such channels continue to be an important factor in the success of customer experience companies.
The simplest way to do this is with data: 60% of customers indicate that they’re more likely to visit a website again if it has live chat for customer service, and a few more (63%) say that a live chat widget will increase their willingness to make a purchase.
But that still leaves the question of how live chat stacks up against other possible communication channels. Well, nearly three-quarters (73%) are more comfortable using live chat for customer service issues than email or phone—and a high fraction (61%) are especially annoyed by the prospect of being put on hold.
If this isn’t enough, there are customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores to think about as well. This is perhaps the strongest data point in support of customer live chat, as 87% of customers give a positive rating to their live chat conversations.
Agents also prefer live chat over the phone because regularly dealing with angry and upset customers via phone can take an emotional toll. Live chat contributes to agent job retention—a big, expensive issue that many CX leaders are constantly trying to grapple with.
So, the data is clear and it makes sense for all the reasons we’ve discussed: Live chat for customer service shows every indication of being a worthwhile communication channel, both now and in the future.
6 Tips for Encouraging Customers to Use Live Chat
With that having been said, the next few sections will detail some of the most promising strategies for getting more of your customers to use your live chat features.
1. Make Sure People Know You have Live Chat Services
The first (and probably easiest) way to get more customers to use your live chat is to take every step possible to make sure they know it’s something you offer. Above, we argued that little special effort is required to get potential customers to use a new channel, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean that there’s no use in broadcasting its existence.
You can get a lot of mileage out of promoting live chat through your normal marketing channels–a mention on your support page, on your social feeds, and at the bottom of your order confirmation emails, for example. In the rest of this section, we’ll outline a few other low-cost ways to boost engagement with live chat for customer service.
First, use your IVR to move callers from phone to messaging. You can also mention that you support live chat for customer service during the phone hold message. We noted above that people tend to hate being put on hold. You can use that to your advantage by offering them the more attractive alternative of hopping onto a digital messaging channel instead—including WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, and SMS. For example, this might sound as simple as: “Press 2 to chat with an agent over SMS text messaging, or get faster support over live web chat on our website.”
From your perspective, an added benefit is that your agents can easily shuffle between several different live chat conversations, whereas that isn’t possible on the phone. This means faster resolutions, a higher volume of questions answered, and more satisfaction all the way around.
Similarly, include plenty of links to live chat when communicating with your customers. After they make a purchase, for example, you could include a message suggesting they utilize live chat to resolve any questions they have. If you’re sending them other emails, that’s a good place to highlight live chat as well. Don’t neglect hero pages and product pages; being able to answer questions while talking directly to current and future buyers is a great way to boost sales.
BODi® (formerly Beach Body) is a California-based nutrition and fitness company that pursued exactly this strategy when they ditched their older menu-based support system in favor of “Ask BODi AI.”
This eventually became a cost-effective support channel that was able to answer a variety of free-form questions from customers, leading to happier buyers and better financial performance.
2. Minimize the Hassle of Using Live Chat
One of the better ways of boosting engagement with any feature, including live chat, is to make it as pain-free as possible.
Take contact forms, for example, which can speed up time to resolution by organizing all the basic information a service agent needs. This is great when a customer has a complex issue, but if they only have a quick question, filling out even a simple contact form may be onerous enough to prevent them from asking it.
There’s a bit of a balancing act here, but, in general, the fewer fields a contact form has, the more likely someone is to fill it out.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has made it possible to use an AI assistant to collect information about customers’ specific orders or requests. When such an assistant detects that a request is complex and needs human attention, it can ask for the necessary information to pass along to an agent. This turns the traditional contact form into a conversation, placing it further along in the customer service journey so only those customers who need to fill it out will have to use it.
Or take something as prosaic as the location and prominence of your ‘live chat’ button. Is it easy to find, or is it buried so deep you’d need Indiana Jones to dig it out? Does it pop out proactively to engage potential or returning customers with contextual messaging based on what they’re browsing?
It’s also worth briefly mentioning that the main value prop of rich messaging content– like carousel cards, buttons, and quick replies–results in much less friction for the consumer. We have a dedicated section on rich messaging below that spells this out in more detail.
Though they may seem minor in isolation, there’s an important truth here: if you want to get more people to use your live chat for customer service, make it easy and pain-free for them to do so. Every additional second of searching or fiddling means another lost opportunity.
3. Personalize Your Chat
Another way to make live chat for customer service more attractive is to personalize your interactions. Personalization can be anything from including an agent’s name and picture in the chat interface displayed on your webpage to leveraging an LLM to craft a whole bespoke context for each conversation.
For our purposes, the two big categories of personalization are brand-specific personalization and customer-specific personalization. Let’s discuss each.
Brand-specific personalization
For the former, marketing and contact teams should collaborate to craft notifications, greetings, etc., to fit their brand’s personality. Chat icons often feature an introductory message such as “How can I help you?” to let browsers know their questions are welcome. This is a place for you to set the tone for the rest of a conversation, and such friendly wording can encourage people to take the next step and type out a message.
More broadly, these departments should also develop a general tone of voice for their service agents. While there may be some scripted language in customer service interactions, most customers expect human support specialists to act like humans. And, since every request or concern is a little different, agents often need to change what they say or how they say it.
This is no less true for buyers on different parts of your site. Customer questions will be different depending on whether they’re on a checkout page, a product page, or the help center because they are at very distinct points in their buying journey. It’s important to contextualize any proactive messaging and the conversational flow itself to accommodate this (i.e., “Need help checking out? We’ve got live agents standing by.” versus “Have questions about this product? Try asking me”).
Setting rules for tone of voice and word choice ensure the messaging experience is consistent no matter which agent helps a customer or what the conversation is about.
Customer-specific personalization
Then, there’s customer-specific personalization, which might involve something as simple as using their name, or extend to drawing from their purchase history to include the specifics of the order they’re asking about.
Once upon a time, this work fell almost entirely to human contact centers, but no more! Among the many things that today’s LLMs excel at is personalization. Machine learning has long been used to personalize recommendations (think: Netflix learning what kinds of shows you like), but when LLMs are turbo-charged with a technique like retrieval-augmented generation (which allows them to use validated data sources to inform their replies to questions), the results can be astonishing.
Machine-based personalization and retrieval-augmented generation are both big subjects, and you can read through the links for more context. But the high-level takeaway is that, together, they facilitate the creation of a seamless and highly personalized experience across your communication channels using the latest advances in AI. Customers will feel more comfortable using your live chat feature, and will grow to feel a connection with your brand over time.
4. Include Privacy and Data Usage Messages
As of this writing, news recently broke that a data breach may have resulted in close to three billion – billion! – people having their social security numbers compromised. You’re no doubt familiar with a bevy of similar stories, which have been pouring forth since more or less the moment people started storing their private data online.
And yet, for the savvy customer experience director, this is an opportunity; by taking privacy very seriously, you can distinguish yourself and thereby build trust.
Customers visiting your website want an assurance that you will take every precaution with their private information, and this can be provided through easy-to-understand data privacy policies and customizable cookie preferences.
Live messaging tools can add a wrinkle because they are often powered by third-party software. Customer service messaging can also require a lot of personal information, making some users hesitant to use these tools.
You can quell these concerns by elucidating how you handle private customer data. When a message like this appears at the start of a new chat, is always accessible via the header, or persists in your chat menu, customers can see how their data is safeguarded and feel secure while entering personal details.
An additional wrinkle comes from the increasing ubiquity of tools based on generative AI. Many worry that any information provided to a model might be used to “train” that model, thus increasing the chances that it’ll be leaked in the future. The best way to avoid this calamity is to partner with a conversational AI for CX platform that works tirelessly to ensure that your customers’ data is never used in this way.
That said, whatever you do, make sure your AI assistants have messages designed to handle requests about privacy and security. Someone will ask eventually, and it’s good to be prepared.
5. Use Rich Messages
Smartphones have become a central hub for browsing the internet, shopping, socializing, and managing daily activities. As text messaging gradually supplemented most of our other ways of communicating, it became obvious that an upgrade was needed.
This led to the development of rich messaging applications and protocols such as Apple Messages for Business and WhatsApp, which use Rich Communication Services (RCS). RCS features enhancements like buttons, quick replies, and carousel cards—all designed to make interactions easier and faster for the customer.
For all these reasons, using rich messaging in live chat with customers will likely help boost engagement. Customers are accustomed to seeing emojis now, and you can include them as a way of humanizing and personalizing your interactions. There might be contexts in which they need to see graphics or images, which is very difficult with the old Short Messaging Service (SMS).
In the final analysis, rich messaging offers another powerful opportunity to create the kind of seamless experience that makes interacting with your support enjoyable and productive.
6. Separating Chat and Agent Availability
Once upon a time, ‘chat availability’ simply meant the same thing as ‘agent availability,’ but today’s language models are rapidly becoming capable enough to resolve a wide variety of issues on their own. In fact, one of the major selling points of AI assistants is that they provide round-the-clock service because they don’t need to eat, sleep, or take bathroom breaks.
This doesn’t mean that they can be left totally alone, of course. Humans still need to monitor their interactions to make sure they’re not being rude or hallucinating false information. But this is also something that becomes much easier when you pair with an industry-leading conversational AI for CX platform that has robust safeguards, monitoring tools, and the ability to switch between different underlying models (in case one starts to act up).
Having said that, there are still a wide variety of tasks for which a living agent is still the best choice. For this reason, many companies have specific time windows when live chat for customer service is available. When it’s not, some choose to let customers know when live chat is an option by communicating the next availability window.
In practice, users will often simply close their tabs if they can’t talk to a person, cutting the interaction off before it begins. In our view, the best course is usually to shift the conversation to an asynchronous channel where it can be handled by an AI assistant able to hand the chat off to an agent when one becomes available.
Employing these two strategies, means that your ability to service customers is decoupled from operational constraints of agent availability, and you are always ready to seize the opportunity to serve customers when they are eager to engage with your brand
Creating Greater CX Outcomes with Live Web Chat is Just the Start.
Live web chat with customers remains an excellent way to resolve issues while building trust and boosting the overall customer experience. The best strategies for increasing engagement with your live chat is to make sure people know it’s an option, make it easy to use, personalize interactions where possible—and make the most out of AI to automatically resolve routine inquiries while filling in live agent availability gaps.
If you’re interested in taking additional steps to resolve common customer service pain points, check out our ebook on the subject. It features a number of straightforward, actionable strategies to help you keep your customers as happy as possible!
