Live Chat Introduction
Chat is a great way to offer instant 1 to 1 engagement with your customers driving loyalty and overall increased lifetime value of spend. Customers who are wanting help on the check-out page before purchasing, or whether a style is in stock can be responded to quickly, driving great outcomes for customer and your business alike.
Whilst Zendesk offers their standard Zendesk Chat badge functionality, which can be deployed easily on any website, the Zendesk Web Widget is a better choice giving you more features including Zendesk AnswerBot for those easier repeatable questions - simply answered! Remember the stats show that the younger demographic prefers to self-serve, so let them have the answers.
Considerations on selecting a good human chat agent
Chat agents need to have special powers! They need to type fast and accurately, and leverage the good selection of chat shortcuts to cover all the standard responses at speed. Chat agents tend to need less formality with their responses, offering a good personalised experience.
Remember that chat is an agent intensive channel, and customers expect speedy responses. If your chat agent(s) doesn't have capacity to quickly respond, your customers are going to be frustrated.
How the Zendesk Web Widget works
The Web Widget offers a number of great features to support your customer service strategies. If you are utilising Zendesk Guide for customer help articles, the Web Widget embeds these articles and can suggest solutions even before they get to chat.
On top of that, Zendesk AnswerBot offers a nice relaxed customer engagement options, actively searching and helping for answers, while always allowing the customer to talk to a human if it isn't working for them. Here is an example of how it looks...
As you can see, AnswerBot asks politely how it can help and then based on your question, searches the Help Center for answers. Those articles offered as solutions can be clicked into with everything displayed in the modal. What this means is that customers can find answers to their questions whilst still looking at your product pages - exactly where you want them.
If the article offered doesn't answer the customer question, the customer can then select "No, I need help" (see screenshot below)...
The customer can then be offered to chat with Customer Service or Leave a Message. It is worth noting that if there are no chat agents online or it is after business hours, the Web Widget will not offer chat at this juncture. That's quite a nice capability!
From an agent perspective, both chats and messages will come in as a ticket and the agent can respond accordingly. The new agent workspace provides a very engaging and informative environment to the agent without having to click into side-bars and other functionality. The customer profile is displayed on the right hand side, with all their interactions from your website! The agent has great context with a 360 degree view in order to answer the customer enquiry quickly and effectively!
So go on! Treat your customers with chat and drive your business to greater successes!