What is live support?
Live support, also known as live chat, is a technology that allows a business to communicate with its website visitors in real time. This provides instant customer support to the website visitor and assists with immediately resolving customer queries. Live support integrates with a website and includes a pop-up feature. Whenever a visitor is on the website, a live chat window automatically pops up asking if the visitor needs any assistance. Although every live support software has its own specific features, there are a couple of general features that can be found in most live support products, such as real-time visitor monitoring, custom chat windows, invisible traffic analysis, website integration, and secure administration controls.
Some live support operates with Javascript, Java, or Flash Player, while others use a more traditional method and connect every user to the admin directly. To ensure that one admin deals with one user at a time, some applications enable users to be in a queue and get assistance when their turn comes.
Live support can be used across many different departments within a business, such as marketing, customer support, and sales.
Types of live support
Live support provides a communication platform to engage with website visitors and customers in real time. There are a few different types of live support listed below:
- Text support: This is the most common type of live support provided to website visitors. The customers get instant support by communicating with agents via the chat window present on the website.
- Video and voice support: Along with text, certain live support solutions also have capabilities for video and voice support. The customers can get on a video or voice call (if needed) with the admin directly.
- Co-browsing or screen sharing: This type of live support allows co-browsing or screen sharing along with text support. Co-browsing and screen sharing features permit the agent and customer to navigate web pages synchronously.
Benefits of live support
There are several benefits when a business gets an opportunity to stay connected with its customers 24/7. The benefits are listed below:
- Improve customer engagement: With an open chat window like live support, customers can get connected with the brands whenever they want to. Live support’s 24/7 availability ensures that no query or engagement opportunity is missed.
- Enhance customer experience: Live support provides real-time support to customers and helps resolve their issues promptly. This increases conversion rates and enhances the customer experience.
- Conversation optimization: With real-time problem-solving capabilities, visitors are more likely to convert by completing a purchase or taking the desired action.
- Increase customer satisfaction: Live support’s 24/7 availability means visitors have easy access to the information they need, whether it is related to the website or purchasing a product. This real-time assistance helps increase the customer satisfaction rate.
- Track visitors and gain insights: Live support can keep track of visitors and also some basic information about them, like email, phone number, name, etc. This data might be helpful for the marketing team to gain insights into a potential customer.
Live support best practices
In order to make live support work efficiently, follow these best practices:
- The chat window needs to be placed strategically on the website
- There can be chat windows present on every important page and not just the landing/main page
- It is important to ask relevant questions to seek the visitor’s attention
- To manage high demands, an auto-response can be set to inform the customer that an agent will shortly get connected or mention the queue number
- An agent must have access to the past conversation history (if any) of a customer for initiating a better conversation
- To have access to a vast pool of information, a database like a contact center knowledge base can be integrated
- Live support can be used to track agent performance
Live support vs. chatbots
Both chatbots and live support are used by businesses to assist and engage customers. The major difference between both is that a chatbot is an AI-driven chat solution with machine learning and natural language processing that communicates with customers in a human-like manner. In live support, however, there is a human admin that takes up all the queries raised by a visitor. Being AI-driven, a chatbot interacts and engages customers with a chat interface and runs as per pre-programmed rules. Both chatbots and live support can work well together. Chatbots can resolve easy and repetitive queries and can be helpful to engage customers when the support team is not available or busy. Live support, being a human-driven software, is capable of resolving even more complex queries.
Priya Dey
Priya is a senior research analyst at G2 focused on customer service software. Prior to joining G2, Priya worked as a secondary market research analyst in one of the Big 4's for more than 5 years. In her free time, she enjoys cooking and spending time with her friends and family.
