How to scale customer service without hiring new personnel

By Jason Grills

When your business is growing, this inevitably leads to the growth of the customer base, which then again, leads to more customers making inquiries to the customer support department. While business growth is thrilling, it can easily turn out to be a customer service nightmare.

These times can prove to be especially hard for companies unable to hire extra support agents for a variety of reasons. However, can those companies manage this extra workload without even hiring additional personnel? Yes, with live chat for website. Let’s see why this is a perfect solution for this scenario.

What is live chat for website?

Several vendors of live chat software use the latest web technologies, best practices and user experience standards to make the perfect software solution for customer service. Live chat for website enables customer support agents or anyone else appointed to one of the customer service roles to directly engage customers visiting a company’s official website.

This tool enables employees to become more effective and productive, thus removing the need to hire more people. Now, at this point, this might seem a bold statement, but let us assure you that it is quite true. However, to show you why this is the case, we have to take a look at what’s under the hood of live chat software.

Enable agents to handle several customers at once

One of the main problems of companies that are unable to scale their customer support to fit current customer needs and requirements is the growing frustration of their customer base. If you leave the customers unattended while they have burning needs, you may soon lose them to your competition.

Live chat software enables agents to engage in multiple conversations at the same time. This is very convenient for organizations that don’t have the budget to support the hiring of extra support agents. Now, you may think that this affects the quality of the provided service, but there are systems in place to ensure the same level of service quality.

Managers can control the conversations and success rate of support agents through live chat software logs. This management can be done in real time, by setting up the software so messages can’t be sent until a senior and more experienced agent approves them.

Easy installation and fast onboarding

The processes of hiring and training require the undivided attention of your organization. And in this case, attention translates into money and focus shifting from the core business processes, especially if we are talking about SMBs. Not only does the level of customer service drop, but the business process may suffer as well.

If a company decides to go with live chat software, the situation is quite the opposite. Live chat software installation is as easy as copying and pasting the code on your webpage. The moment you do so your customer service department and customers can start using it.

The most modern live chat tools are easy to use, which ensures that there is no down time in your customer service operations. Agents can start using it even if they don’t have extensive IT knowledge.

Learn what customers’ need

As the business grows the number of interactions between customers/prospects and customer service starts to grow very rapidly. Customer service can easily get stretched even with a powerful tool such as live chat software in their hands. Thanks to the analytics and reports features of the live chat tool, this can easily be avoided with a little bit of creativeness and efficiency.

You may wonder how to stretch and scale something that is already over stretched. By using the abovementioned features you can easily identify the trends in customers’ inquiries and the answers that have led to the issue being resolved.

By compiling this data into an FAQ document (frequently asked questions) and publishing it on your website, you will stay on top of your customers needs and requirements. Your customers will be able to find the answers to their questions without the need to contact support department.

Live chat software history and reports tools ensure ticket deflection when the department is already spread thin.

Strategic scaling

There are very few software solutions on the market able to empower organizations to strategically scale. The potential of live chat tools comes from the ability to completely customize them. Beside this deep customization feature, the most modern live chat software is mobile-friendly. This means that you will be able to reach customers both proactively and in real-time, despite your and their location and the device used.

It is of utmost importance to provide personalized customer support, especially when your business grows. And this is exactly what live chat software offers. You can customize the user interface colors to match your branding or website design, use pre-canned messages to respond quickly and even see messages before the customers send them.

Evolve with your customers

When using this powerful software solution, which enables easy scaling, the customer service department can evolve along with the customer base. For this purpose, you can use the surveys and ratings features of live chat software.

With an accurate insight into how your customers feel about your service and what is it that they like and dislike, you can make improvements on the go. If your goal is to keep the employee turnover rate at its minimum, while keeping the level of service at its best, live chat software is definitely worth considering.

__________
Jason Grills is a technical writer currently associated with ProProfs Chat. He enjoys writing about emerging customer support products, trends in customer support industry and the financial impacts of using such tools. In his spare time, Jason likes traveling extensively to learn about new cultures and traditions.

Social link: https://twitter.com/jason_proprofs

 

Leave a Reply

The Self-Employment Survival Guide can help you succeed. Learn all about it here.

Self-Employment Survival Guide book cover