Deflect Customer Service to Live Chat

Scaling the sales and revenue of your store is fun, but scaling customer service teams is not fun.

As sales grow, customer service ticket volume also grows.

1. If your team starts to fall behind, the backlog of tickets piles up.
2. Your slow response time exponentially grows the backlog as customers follow up multiple times.
3. And eventually, angry customers show up in Facebook ad complaints and reviews.

If you have a team managing live chat for you, there comes a point where it makes sense to deflect a lot of customer service tickets from email and other channels directly into live chat.The live chat team can handle situations quickly.

1. This is best for your customer since they get a fast response.
2. And it's best for your in-house team to be able to focus on more complex tier 2 situations that require their specialized knowledge.

At HelpFlow, we have been providing 24/7 Live chat teams to 100+ e-commerce stores for over five years. We have helped many of our clients scale their customer service operations by deflecting a lot into live chat. It would be helpful to share how we do it so you can do the same.

Here’s how it works...

Add Live Chat CTAs in The Post Purchase Flow

Having live chat on your website as part of your pre-sales process will not only drive more conversions, but it also conditions visitors to use chat when they have a question.

Continue this after the sale by including live chat as a CTA in all of your post sales infrastructure and communication.

Here are examples: Post sale thank you page

1. Order confirmation emails
2. Shipping notifications
3. Order tracking infrastructure

This gets customers in the habit of using live chat if they have a question rather than creating an email ticket.

Guide Customers to Live Chat in New Ticket Confirmation Emails

When someone does create a new ticket, many stores send a confirmation auto responder to the customer.

It’s definitely best practice to include self serve resources like FAQs here, but it’s also an opportunity to drive customers into live chat.

1. Make clear in these auto responders that your team is online to answer questions quickly on chat.
2. Include a simple “click to chat” link that opens the chat box directly on the website.
3. You can get fancy with the link to auto populate ticket information for the chat team. But the routing to chat is what’s most helpful for the customer to get a fast response.

This takes a lot of email ticket situations over to live chat to get resolved and closed.

Consider Blocking Email Creation of Tickets Completely

You will notice that many large enterprise e-commerce operations do not allow tickets to be created via email.

If a customer wants to create a ticket, they go to a support section of the website and are routed through self-serve resources before being able to create a ticket to manage via email. Yes, many brands make this too cumbersome on the customer, but the underlying logic of why they do it is for efficiency of their infrastructure. If every email they received created a ticket, they would be drowning in a disorganized mess of tickets.

1. You can do something similar by guiding visitors to a support section of your website that includes live chat to get answers to their most common questions.
2. You could even require ticket creation through live chat so that all tickets start on chat and only escalate to your in-house email team if needed.

Again, make sure to consider the customer's experience here and don't put a ton of hurdles in place to get help. But if you have a live chat team available, then the customer will appreciate having a human to talk to quickly about their problem.

Empower The Live Chat Team to Solve Problems

In order to make this work, the live chat team should have access to order tracking, return processing, and other key parts of the customer service infrastructure. They should also be authorized to make decisions on how to resolve situations like refunds, etc.

This ensures they are empowered to handle a lot of situations and completely resolve them directly on the chat.

How to Run a 24/7 Live Chat Team Effectively

You can definitely implement this with an in-house team on chat but it should be separate from your core tier 2 email team. Having your experienced reps handling simple tickets all day on chat (which is less efficient than email) is a great way to burn through cash that could be used to scale further on advertising.

We can dig deep into your team's structure on a Strategy Call.  Even if we do not work together, you'll get a ton of value from strategizing on the call together. Book a time that works for you by clicking below.  Always happy to help!