Live Chat Support Tips

Our live chat support started with one person, our CEO Ryan Macpherson. Back then, he knew how live chat is one of the most effective ways to engage with customers.

As a start-up, we've since built a legendary Customer Success team, which is now run by Bridie Tiplady, who swears by Ryan's motto, 'think big, start small'.

Her team answers our customers' questions daily on live chat and hosts weekly webinars. They go above and beyond for our customers and have quite frankly become adored by them as well.

So, if you're reading this as a customer, don't be scared by live chat. It's there for a reason, so we can help solve your questions in real-time. And don't worry, no question is a silly question!

What to expect in this article

If you're looking to build a Live Chat feature for your business or need a Live Chat template, look no further.

The question you may be wondering is how do you build a Live Chat support feature from an auto-response bot tool and take it to another level which will turn your team into celebrities your customers love?

In this article, Bridie shares her effective live chat support tips to engage customers.

When we sat down with Bridie, she explained how she has two distinct paths for the live chat support channels at Coassemble - inbound and outbound paths. Let's break down what these two paths look like, which will help anyone build a live chat channel in the near future.

Inbound live chat support channel

The inbound live chat channel helps direct our customers to the best resources. Bridie tells us that she uses a bot only to assess how to direct the question in the most efficient way possible. So, if a customer reaches out asking a question about billing for example, the bot will send them over to our finance team.

While some companies only use bots on their live chat support channels, our bot is specifically used to identify the customers' needs. Once the bot can help with the chat requests, the Coassemble team jumps straight in to help answer the questions further.

Wondering what our resources look like via our bot? Our customers can jump straight to:

• How to get help on how to use Coassemble
• Resources
• Webinars
• Plan & Billings
• Reports
• video upload help
• Sharing me course help
• User permissions
• Report a bug
• I have an idea/feedback
• Something else
• Forgot a password?

The inbound channel is also a fantastic way for us to promote campaigns as well.

Outbound live chat support channel

The outbound channel is designed so our Customer Success team can reach out to a customer directly in real-time. As an exciting element to the chat widget, the team reaches out to customers to say hi, and ask them if they need any help in their Coassemble journey. Even though it's a live chat support channel, our customer service experts chat to the users like friends and don't ask robotic questions.

The outbound channel also allows our team to see what the customer has clicked on before. If they've attended a webinar for example, Bridie's team might send them a link to sign up to the next webinar too. This helps us target our customers with content they might like to see more of.

And while this chat window is a fantastic opportunity to get to know our customers and website visitors, it's essential to be concise and, of course, send a fun GIF to break the ice, so our users know we are real!

How to engage customers with these live chat support tips

Now we've determined the differences with our live chat support channels, here are Bridie's live chat support tips. This will help your support agents be effective in their roles and give the type of customer service experience every company should level up to in real-time.

1. Set expectations

One of the biggest live chat tips you need to get right from the beginning is to set expectations about when you will be available to chat to your customers. You probably have one person doing five different jobs if you're a start-up so time will be of the essence! Make sure your customer support agents are transparent with each customer when they land in the chat window. Potentially, you could set this up with a bot if needed.

In an ideal world, people expect instant contact, and while it might be hard to assess their needs straight away, they'll appreciate a quick message to let them know when you can answer their questions. In the live chat support world, many support agents try and get back to their customers as quickly as possible, but as a start-up, it might be challenging to do so.

2. Learn everything about the product

Your customer success hires should learn as much about the product during the onboarding process as possible. Make sure you have a customer success playbook in place, which your team can revert to as and when needed.

As a start-up, you'll know that the product will be evolving quickly, which will mean so many updates and changes along the way. The customer success team will need to keep across all product updates to ensure proactive live chat conversations with the website visitors. While the customer might ask many questions in their chat conversation, it's essential that the team feel confident with a good understanding of the changes and updates.

If you happen to get a question you can't answer, it's best to tell the customer you'll get back to them by checking with someone who will know. Being honest will help you gain more respect than giving a wrong answer!

3. Keep your brand voice consistent

Sometimes it's easy for various teams in the business to get caught up with branding. At Coassemble, we're a young, ambitious team striving to help change the face of online training. We're also an honest bunch of people who want our customers to grow alongside us.

We make sure our fun personalities shine right through from our product to our website and right through into our live chat widget!

As people who pride themselves on exceptional customer experience, we make sure it runs right through to our sales team by letting our personalities shine through with consistency through the entire business. It's important to have fun with your customers and let them know you're real people who really do want to help them.

4. Be curious

From both a customer success perspective and a support perspective, Bridie said it's essential to be curious about what the customer is interested in to gain value. Don't be worried about getting them off live chat as quickly as possible, and ask them questions to help drive engagement.

5. Understand how to deal with angry customers

Every business in the world will have a process about how to deal with angry customers. Unfortunately, sometimes the people on the other end of the live chat support channel receive the brunt of someone else's day. There could be a thousand reasons why someone is taking their frustrations out on you, but 99% of the time, it's going to be nothing to do with you.

Bridie said:

While it's important to acknowledge the customer's frustration, it's wise to help them know that ultimately you are there to help them. Sometimes incoming chats come in waves of angry people, which your customer success team will need to handle. The team must understand their rights and have an escalation process in place if required.

6. Don't forget about mental health

All customer support agents must put their mental health first in the workplace. Make sure you take regular breaks from your desk (especially if your team are working from home), and if your business has 'me time' days put in place, take a day out for yourself to avoid burnout.

7. Pay attention to how conservations are routed

As a customer success manager, Bridie told us to make sure you pay attention to how conservations are being routed. At Coassemble, we have seven key inboxes for various teams to manage. Put an excellent structure in place to have the right team member to deal with each inbox

8. Find the right live chat support tool

Want to get started with your live chat support strategy? Start with finding the best live chat app! At Coassemble, we use Intercom live chat, which has worked really well for us.

Once you've found the live chat app that works well for you, then think big and start small just like Ryan did, because all you need is one person to talk to customers and gain loyalty simply by having a honest, proactive chat to help them get started with you.

9. Put your processes in place

Get organized and put your live chat processes in place by using Coassemble's online training platform. Long gone are the days of training employees using multiple apps and spreadsheets. Combine all of your content into one place and send your team an interactive, fun and engaging live chat training that they'll understand quickly.

Check out our How To Talk To Customers template you can get started with and customize as you wish. This is a great starting point to put all of your knowledge and training into one place when looking for a Live Chat template to use. Simply sign up to our 7 day trial and when you log into your workspace, click on Create A New Course tab and you'll find the Course Templates there to use and customize.

Why should you use our course templates?

Our instructional designers are lending you a hand with their creative skills, so you don't have to spend time trying to build your live chat process.

When you jump onto the free trial, you'll instantly notice how engaging and interactive your process will look.

In the 7 Day Free Trial, test our out platform and see if it's the right fit to build your epic live chat process. And, chat to our US-based team on our Live Chat and ask as many questions as you like so we can help you build it.

You can add screens, move screens and customize your content to build a process you'll be proud of. Or, if you prefer, start a new course from scratch and add the screens as you go.

30+ lesson screens to choose from

With 30+ lesson screen templates to choose from, you'll be able to bring your content to life by using them to create an interactive presentation. For example, our popular wheel lesson screen helps you distribute your content into bite-sized interactive pieces.

Add in a quiz (check out our quiz screen here) to break the content up, and make learning fun!

There are plenty of ways to bring your content to life; you'll love using our lesson screen templates to help you see how easy it is to make it happen.

Gain access to more than a live chat template

Coassemble offers much more than training templates to help make your life easier!

Our US-based training experts will help you build a training experience that will instantly make sense to everyone who needs to be involved in it. Drop our team a message in our Live Chat feature on this site, and they'll be able to answer any questions you might have about getting started with your training.

• You'll discover how to build a genuinely awesome training course that will knock the socks off your team and other stakeholders.
• You'll learn how to send your training program pro-actively so it doesn't get lost in a sea of spam.
• You'll also gain access to understanding how your team engaged with your training through our excellent analytics tool.
• You can ask for feedback from your team about how they found your training so you can continually improve and update it when needed.

Try Coassemble for FREE today!

Test out Coassemble with our 7-day free trial here!

Try our awesome lesson screen templates and have fun discovering how much you can get out of using our system to keep your training together in one placeq.

Send our team a message on Live Chat so we can answer any questions you might have about getting started, and you'll realize that within 7 days, we'll turn you into the workplace hero!