Chapter 5: Developing a Customer Support Approach

At the end of the day, you want to provide value to your customers. Your goal is to solve their problem, and to teach them that they can trust you to solve their problems. How do you do this? With solid customer support. 

In the same way that you don’t want your customer experience to be support-centric, it is like a tightrope balance—You don’t want it to be too sales-centric, either. You need to walk the line and ensure that every customer has an easy time getting the information they need to take the next step with you. 

Don’t make the common mistakes made with live chat. 

When creating your customer support approach, remember: 

• Chat is a conversation. You want to make sure that all agents are able to chat naturally, be themselves, find the right voice, all while doing a great job representing your brand.
  
  
• Use a knowledge base (and keep it up to date). Have your FAQs written out, well-known, and documented, then make sure all of your live agents have access to it. This ensures that they have the information they need to chat with customers unscripted.
  
  If you’re unsure about taking time to build a knowledge base, trust us, the pros outweigh the cons. At Ravience, we actually create a custom knowledge base for all of our chat clients. Here’s a more in-depth look at what a knowledge base is (and how to create one).
  
  
• Anticipate your customer’s needs during the chat with messaging strategies. Just because your agents are trained doesn’t mean you can throw strategy out the window.
  
  
• Bots aren’t for everyone. Chatbots are easy, but they can’t handle complex questions. If you have a complex product or service, you need to really consider having a live agent (or handle frustrated customers). 
  

You also want to be sure to create such an awesome customer experience that your reputation grows positively with every interaction. Here are a few tips to make sure that you can build a customer-obsessed reputation with live chat: 

• Match your customers' language. If they use a lot of emojis, try to mimic that in your conversation. If you talk like them, there’s more opportunity for connection and communication.
  
  
• Don’t lose your personality. Humans crave connections with other humans. When your agents let their personality show in their live chat, your customers know that they’re chatting with someone behind the screen who’s like them. They’re more likely to listen and learn to trust your brand by trusting your live chat agent.
  
  
• Message back quickly. There’s nothing worse than being left on read. Don’t do it to your customers! If you respond in a timely manner, your customers feel seen and heard. That’s what we all want, right?
  
  
• Start the conversation. It’s a little nerve-wracking to start talking to someone you don’t even know! Beat the customer to the punch—and alleviate that road block—by talking to them first.
  
  Proactive chat is effective (more on that in Chapter 8). Ravience’s proactive chat strategy engages 67-85% more visitors than those who initiate the chat themselves. Who’d have thought...your customers are just waiting to talk to you!
  
  
• Have the answers. When your customers do talk to you, you want to make sure you’re able to know what you’re talking about. Make sure your live agents can help your customers with everything they need. This is where that knowledge base can really come in handy! 
  

You ultimately want to make sure that your customer has everything they need to feel comfortable in taking the next step on their journey to becoming a loyal customer and raving fan. Provide them with access to the information and conversations they need to be confident that they’re doing the right thing to solve their problem.