How to Increase Customer Satisfaction with Proactive Customer Service Via Live Chat

Every brand talks of building a tribe of loyal customers. That’s all good. However, what many of them miss is the fact that customer loyalty is not the result of a great product alone. In most cases, you win your customers’ loyalty by giving them exceptional support.

One of the best ways to ensure that your customer support really ticks all the boxes in your customers’ books is to offer proactive customer service via live chat.

What is Proactive Customer Service?

What does proactive customer service mean?

Proactive customer service means anticipating your customers' needs and addressing them proactively before they contact you.

In the case of live chat, proactive customer service means reaching out to your customers with the aim of helping them get the best experience on your website. While this means going out of your way (customer support is already busy after all), it helps you reduce the number of chats that will be inbound. In other words, it puts you in control of the conversations.

3 Ways to Increase Customer Satisfaction with Proactive Customer Service via Live Chat

So how do you pull off an effective proactive customer service via live chat? After all, you need your customers to reach out to you for help, don’t you?

Not necessarily. Here’s how you can be proactive on live chat:

1. Target the right audience

Being proactive doesn’t mean shooting a message at every visitor on your website. You need to understand your visitors and target those that seem to be “warm” or ready to engage. Here are a few signs of a warm visitor (you can get this data using an audience insights tool):

• Spend time on particular web pages
• Visit certain pages numerous times
• Look at a particular product/service 

All these are signs of a visitor who’s ready to buy but still trying to make up their mind. This is where you become proactive and reach out to find out if they have any particular questions they would like to ask concerning the product/service in question.   

2. Direct visitors to relevant information

Most customer support teams are overwhelmed, making it difficult to give each customer the attention they deserve. One way to reduce inbound chat traffic is to direct your visitors to relevant information. By arming your visitors with the right information upfront you eliminate unnecessary chats and actually encourage necessary ones.

3. Use automation

One of the best parts about live chat applications is the fact that you can automate them to take care of a number of customer service tasks. One of them is reaching out to website visitors.

When it comes to proactive customer service, you can use the automation feature to set rules that trigger certain messages to be sent to the web visitor. For example, if a visitor dwells on a certain page for a certain period of time, an automated message can be sent to them asking if they need help with, well, whatever the page is all about. 

Get started with Smith.ai Live Web Chat risk-free

It's time to try live chat on your website. Just one new client captured via chat can pay for a year (or more) of Smith.ai's live web chat service. We provide fully staffed live website chat with professional agents. Outsourced live chat is best for small businesses like law firms, e-commerce businesses, IT consultants, financial planners, property managers, realtors, and marketing agencies (to name just a few!).

Our live agents are highly skilled and can answer common questions about your business, qualify new leads, schedule appointments, take payments, and more. You stay in the loop when chat transcripts are sent to you after each conversation and logged in your CRM. There's no setup fee, services are month-to-month, and there's no annual contract. Plans start at just just $140/month and are risk-free with our 14-day money-back guarantee.