The advance of the live chat platforms
Live chat tools are making a serious headway as more and more organizations are adopting them to stay competitive by improving customer satisfaction and introducing a faster resolution of customer issues.
According to Gartner, by 2018, over 80% of companies will offer some form of live chat on their website to interact with customers (Gartner: Best Practices for Making Live Chat a Must-Have Engagement Channel). In addition, a Salesforce research found that 64% of customers expect companies to respond and interact with them in real-time, while 80% of business buyers expect the same.
Live chat provides immediate means to alleviate customer pain points: average customer handle times are way shorter; customer support is much more efficient as they handle multiple conversations at once, keeping the quality high. (See an infographic on customer support best practices).
B2B organizations have always relied on the more traditional channels to provide customer service as tech support queries tend to be more complex, require step-by-step assistance and even help from more technical members of the support team. According to a Salesforce study, however, 87% of B2B customers say that an immediate response when seeking support influences their loyalty. So even B2B industries are starting to adopt live chat tools as a means to assist customers not only presale but also to be used as a post-sale customer support channel.
Live chat platforms: some drawbacks
Live chat adoption and use doesn’t go without a certain level of aggravation for support teams. The very same advantages of using live chat tools like real-time communication with customers, can sometimes backfire, especially when the supported solutions are feature-rich and complex. Often times, users cannot explain well what caused an error or what issue they experience. The communication may get lengthy and unproductive as support is struggling to understand what the problem is. What’s more, if the support team fails to reproduce and troubleshoot it, they’ll have to take up software engineers’ time. Needless to say, at this point the user is already upset and tech support — frustrated.
User session tools to the rescue
Real-time user session tools would be live chat’s natural ally in their quest to arm support teams with an end-to-end solution and help them resolve customer issues faster. Imagine your live chat tool (say, Intercom, Zendesk, or any other) being able to stream live the session of the user you are conversing with: you’d be able to watch how the customer is using the website, and see real-time all the errors, glitches or UX issues he’s running into. Not only such integration would help support teams close the loop faster but it’s likely to achieve higher customer satisfaction altogether too.
Example: How SessionStack integrates with live chat
SessionStack helps you stream user sessions live or replay them on-demand. The video is combined with a timeline of everything that happened in the browser (user actions, JavaScript exceptions, failed network requests, debug messages, browser details). This shows you exactly how to replicate and understand a problem — be it a bug, UI glitch or just bumpy user experience.
When integrated with a live chat platform, SessionStack plugs into the live chat tool to offer real-time user session streaming for each initiated conversation.
Here’s how it looks like:
Step 1: To start seeing the SessionStack live session streaming option in your live chat dashboard, you’d need to place the below snippet in the head tag of your website/web app:
Step 2: By leveraging the Intercom API, add the custom “sessionstackURL” attribute to start assigning user sessions to the respective users.
Step 3: Once you select the customer you’re currently conversing with, you’ll be able to see his latest session in the lower left corner of the screen:
Step 4: The live session player will present your website/web app as seen by the user. You’ll get all the customer actions, along with error messages, failed network requests, and more, in a timeline to the left.
No need to ask customers for more details to replicate an issue. You can see it exactly as it happened, first-hand. Learn more about SessionStack.
This post was originally shared on the SessionStack blog.
References:
Customer Service Best Practices: https://www.livechatinc.com/livechat-resources/online-customer-service-best-practices/
Customer Support Metrics — The Ultimate Guide: https://www.kayako.com/blog/customer-support-metrics/