Don’t deliver good customer service. Aim for the exceptional service that sets you apart from your competition. Customers demand convenience, speed, and ease when they need to engage with a company. When it comes to live chat (also known as web chat), it’s critical to provide an experience that welcomes the customer to engage with your brand.
Live chat serves as your front line to the customer on your website. This messaging channel allows you to engage with your customers at their point of purchase for higher conversions.
With live chat, customers can reach your brand at their convenience and receive the pre-sales support or post-sales service they need. This article gives you the 11 live chat best practices to deliver the ultimate customer experience.
What is live chat support, and how does it work?
Live chat is a messaging tool integrated into a brand’s website, app, or third-party platform that enables instant communication with customers regarding orders, inquiries, or issues. Unlike email or chatbots, live chat provides a more personalized and real-time interaction.
As demand for immediate support increases, live chat software has become a vital solution for brands, allowing them to engage with users instantly. It is commonly used to resolve customer issues, offer after-sales support, and provide quick troubleshooting, all of which contribute to higher customer satisfaction and retention.
Since AI is evolving at such a rapid pace, companies that win with this tech don’t just add chatbots to answer simple queries. Instead, they add layers of agents that can do very specific things, like booking a call, changing an order, or requesting a refund.
The way live chat works will depend on your unique use case, such as your industry, the kinds of live chat agents you use, and more. However, this is the most typical workflow:
- A visitor opens the chat widget on a website or inside an app and starts a conversation.
- An AI agent responds first, greets the visitor, and asks what they need help with.
- The AI gathers details by asking simple questions, identifies the intent, and suggests answers based on past support content, order data, or account information.
- If the request is simple, the AI resolves it on its own, for example, by sharing order status, return steps, or policy details.
- If the issue is more complex, the AI routes the conversation to a human agent with the full context included.
- The human agent joins the chat without asking the customer to repeat information and continues the conversation.
- The agent can see the full transcript, customer profile, and any actions already taken by the AI.
- Once resolved, the conversation is saved and used to improve future AI responses and support workflows.
Live chat is an excellent customer support channel for many reasons. You can resolve customers’ problems quickly and thanks to AI agents, at a low cost too. Whether you’re already using live chat or considering a new tool to manage customer queries, here are some best practices to keep in mind.
11 live chat best practices for handling customer queries
From setting your business hours to having an always-on chat window, there are quite a few things you can do to provide the best live chat support possible. This is where to start.
1. Choose the right live chat platform for the job
Choosing the right live chat platform has a direct impact on how fast your team responds, how consistent your support feels, and how easy it is to scale as volume grows.
Instead of picking a tool based on brand recognition alone, start by mapping your actual support workflow. Look at where conversations begin, how they move between agents, and what systems agents already use. The platform you choose should support that flow rather than forcing your team to adapt to rigid processes.
Focus first on real-time performance and reliability.
Test how quickly messages appear for both agents and customers, how stable the connection is during busy periods, and whether conversations are ever delayed. A slow chat experience creates frustration and can make customers abandon the session. Run trials during peak hours and simulate multiple chats at once to see how the system handles load.
Next, look closely at integrations.
Your chat tool should connect directly to the systems your team uses every day, such as your CRM, order management platform, help desk, or knowledge base. This allows agents to see customer history, previous tickets, and account details without switching tabs.
Ask practical questions during evaluation. Can agents view past purchases instantly? Can they update customer records from within the chat? Can conversations be saved automatically? These details matter more than surface-level features.
Ease of use is just as important as functionality.
A complex interface slows down response times and increases training time for new hires. Have several agents test each platform and ask them to complete real tasks, such as finding a past conversation, transferring a chat, or sending saved responses. If they struggle to do basic actions quickly, the tool will create friction over time.
Analytics should help you improve performance, not just collect data.
Look for reporting that shows first response time, resolution time, agent workload, and customer satisfaction trends. Make sure you can break results down by team, time period, or issue type. These insights help you spot gaps in staffing, identify training needs, and understand when customers are most active.
Security and compliance should also be part of the evaluation.
Check whether the platform offers role based access, data encryption, and audit logs. If your team handles payment details, personal data, or account access, you need clear controls over who can view and export conversations. Ask vendors how they store transcripts and how long data is retained.
Finally, test before committing.
Run a pilot with a small group of agents and route a portion of real customer chats through the platform. Pay attention to how agents feel using it, how quickly they can solve problems, and whether customers respond positively.
Collect feedback after a few weeks and compare results against your current setup. The right choice is the one that makes it easier for agents to help customers quickly, consistently, and confidently.
2. Be transparent with your availability and set your business hours
While larger brands may have a customer support team working 24/7, other businesses may have limited hours. If you’re one of the companies that limits the hours of support, make sure that you simply disable live chat when your team is unavailable or when your company is closed. Quiq’s chat feature allows you to remove the chat bubble on your site during non-supported hours.
If your chat function isn’t available 24/7 and you prefer to receive after-hours messages, tell your customers that you’ve received their message and let them know when you will get back to them.
The most important thing is to be transparent when someone is likely to reply and when a human agent will be able to give the customer their full attention.
If you’re not sure when your busiest hours are, you can use analytics to discover when most live chat conversations happen to assign more agents during those hours.
3. Collect information upfront
Make it easy for employees to provide a more personalized experience to your customers by collecting a little information upfront. If you don’t have an AI agent integrated with your live web chat yet, use a short web form to collect information. This information can be used to route incoming conversations to the best queue or employee.
Not only that, this extra information will help your employees identify the customer and the nature of their inquiry immediately, instead of having to spend valuable time asking for it. Knowing their full name, account number, topic category, or order number will help your team know who they are talking to and allow them to get a jump on helping the customer faster.
4. Balance personalization and professionalism
Customers expect live chat interactions to be both personal and professional. Striking the right balance between empathy and professionalism can be challenging, but it is key to a positive customer experience.
To help agents achieve this, implement features like skill-based routing to direct inquiries to the most knowledgeable team members. For example, technical support queries can be automatically sent to agents with expertise in the specific product. Additionally, using a unified inbox in your live chat tool allows agents to view all customer messages in one place, streamlining responses and ensuring consistency.
Providing agents with complete context—such as customer history and preferences—can also improve personalization. This empowers agents to tailor their responses, maintaining a professional yet empathetic tone throughout the conversation.
5. Always be ready to respond
Customers want answers fast and at their own pace. That’s one of the key reasons they’re avoiding the phone and having to be tied to it. With live chat, customers can send messages at their own pace, whether they do so in 3 minutes or 3 hours. Companies can set service level agreements (SLA’s) so that everyone understands what an acceptable response time is for customers when they do reach out.
Quiq helps employees meet those SLAs with our Adaptive Response Timer (ART). This feature not only provides visual cues to notify employees when a conversation needs attention, but it also automatically prioritizes multiple conversations based on how slow or fast the customer is responding to messages.
This is critical because chat agents tend to handle 5 or more conversations at one time. Staying on top of the right ones is easy with Quiq.
6. Never get disconnected from the chat window
Your customers are busy and, at times, may need to step away from a chat conversation. Sometimes, it’s only for a few minutes while they check another tab on their desktop. At other times, it may be a lot longer.
When customers don’t respond after a certain time limit, most chat systems will “time out” chat sessions, requiring the customer to initiate a new chat session and start their entire process from the beginning.
Unlike many traditional chat tools, Quiq’s chat platform is asynchronous, which means conversations never end and never have to be restarted. This avoids customer frustration of having to restart a chat conversation and agent uncertainty when a customer goes dark.
Customers can return to the chat conversation whenever it is convenient for them. This conversational continuity gives your agents and your customers peace of mind. For example, they could ask a question in the live chat widget, hop out for lunch, open the same window and the conversation will still be there.
Agents never lose track of conversations and customers feel heard, without having to restart the same conversation over and over again.
7. Present the chat conversation history
Sure, some customers may only need to contact you once, but there are some who need to reach you on a more frequent basis. It’s important that a record is kept of all the past chat interactions you’ve had with a customer.
This conversation history serves as an excellent reference point and helps agents or employees know what kind of issues the customer may have encountered previously and the guidance they were given.
For example, someone may have reached out two months ago about a billing issue and they were pretty upset. They reach out again and if the agent doesn’t know the context, they’ll keep sending canned responses instead of trying to calm the situation down.
Quiq presents the entire chat conversation history to the agent, along with the most recent inquiry. Let’s say a customer starts a conversation with one agent, walks away during the conversation, and comes back while that first agent is on break. The newly assigned agent will have the same latest interaction, as well as past interaction history, presented.
This makes customer inquiries more efficient as the agent knows the entire account history, whether it happened through live chat bots, phone support or email. You get a boost in agent productivity as they can track the entire customer journey without leaving their dashboard and customers feel heard and understood.
Speaking of which…
8. Provide a seamless customer experience
From time to time, one of your employees may not know how to answer a specific question from the customer. So, they will need to transfer the customer to another team member.
When this happens, you need to guarantee that the customer doesn’t have to explain her question or problem all over again. The new team member should have access to the previous conversation and simply continue the conversation.
Quiq’s transfer and collaboration features allow employees to ask for help behind the scenes from peers or managers. Customers can be easily transferred to other team members and support agents, with or without them even knowing.
Anyone invited to help with the conversation can see the entire history of the conversation and any additional information available on the customer. These features create a seamless experience for your customers while optimizing efficiency.
This becomes increasingly important if you’re training new customer support or sales team members but don’t want to risk them getting stage fright on a call.
9. Ensure authentication & data security
As online data breaches rise, securing live chat interactions is essential to maintaining customer trust. Sensitive data exchanged through live chat is vulnerable to malicious attacks, which can damage your brand’s reputation.
Implementing encryption, two-factor authentication (2FA), and single sign-on (SSO) helps protect this information and assures customers that their data is secure. Most proven live chat tools have these features but it’s worth asking which features you get and in which plan.
Additionally, role-based access controls limit sensitive information to authorized personnel only, preventing unauthorized access. By prioritizing robust data security in your live chat platform, you not only protect your customers but also enhance their confidence in your brand, improving conversion rates and customer loyalty.
10. Use sentiment analysis
Use sentiment analysis to understand how customer conversations are going. This is particularly important for companies that may have a large number of chat conversations to manage. Managers can see at a glance which conversations are going well and which may be at risk.
Quiq uses simple visual cues that identify if customers’ mood shifts during a conversation. Agents and managers can quickly see if a conversation needs extra attention or needs to be prioritized.
Sentiment analysis becomes increasingly important with AI agents. A real person can sense the shift in tone somewhat easily, but agents that simply give pre-written responses without considering sentiment can do massive damage to your sales and customer support.
With AI sentiment analysis, you can get valuable insights such as:
- Which instant answers sit well with customers, and which ones cause them to lash out or leave the conversation
- Which types of questions get negative sentiment in responses so you can escalate to human agents
- Which areas of your support/sales require additional agent training
While not perfect, sentiment analysis helps you take proactive measures to make your customer support operations better, with a more human touch.
11. Ask for feedback at the end
Your customers’ feedback or opinion about how the live chat interaction went is definitely a best practice. You trained your team members to provide the best service they could, but the ultimate test will be what your customers think about their overall experience.
This is a timely way to know that you’re on the right track, as well as a great way to continuously improve your live chat experience.
There’s another way you can make the most out of this live chat session. If the customer is satisfied with the provided answer, you can point them to your favorite review site straight from the live chat window and ask them to leave a review.
When the experience is still fresh in their minds, they’re more likely to provide an excellent score and review.
Live chat is your front line
It wasn’t so long ago that the only way customers could get in touch with a company was by picking up the phone and calling. Now, with live chat and messaging options, customers can simply click to chat with a representative who can provide the pre-sales support or post-sales service they need.
Being available to your customers at their “moment of need” is where businesses turn visitors to their website into customers who love their product and service and rave about their experience. Live chat may be one of the first interactions your customers have with anyone from your company. Make sure you leave a great first impression by implementing these 11 live chat best practices.
Ready to provide exceptional, personalized and AI-powered customer support? Get a demo of Quiq today.
