Updated on February 3, 2023
90% of American consumers expect customer service provisions before doing business with a company. Furthermore, 58% of them would switch to a different company if they feel dissatisfied with customer service. In a competitive marketplace, with multiple businesses vying for customer attention, providing instantaneous chat support is crucial for ensuring customer satisfaction and retention.
Zendesk Chat is a versatile tool for facilitating live chat and chatbot support. With an easy setup and reasonable maintenance costs, Zendesk Chat provides essential features to ensure customer loyalty and business scalability.
What is Zendesk Chat?
Zendesk Chat allows users to provide prompt and satisfactory support to customers. It is an ideal option for businesses of any scale since it comes in various price packages depending on the budget and requirements.
The benefits of Zendesk Chat are twofold. Firstly, it allows customers to quickly and conveniently communicate with businesses. Secondly, the consumer data from such software can provide analytics to enterprises, so they may better optimize their services.
Why chat support?
Customer service is essential for both growing and maintaining a customer base. 64% of businesses report the positive influence of quality customer service on business growth. Chat support is predominantly the preferred mode of support since customer queries can be resolved more swiftly than mail or phone calls. Therefore, a business must provide chat support for its services to remain competitive in the increasingly digitized world.
Along with ease of access for customers, chat support also allows for data analytics. Statistics like common customer requests and demographics can guide businesses toward developing more optimized websites.
Live chat vs chatbot
Chat support can be provided in two forms: live chat and chatbots. Live chat support allows a one-on-one customer interaction with an agent, while chatbots are automated AI programs designed to address essential customer support.
Live chat support is highly favorable among customers, with 75% preferring it over any other support system. However, providing live chat support can quickly become cost and labor-intensive. Agents can only interact with one customer at a time, and shift times can lead to customers being unable to get support after working hours.
Providing chatbot support helps alleviate many of these issues. Being an AI program, chatbot systems can interact with multiple customers simultaneously and are capable of providing round-the-clock support. Chatbots also assist in fully addressing basic inquiries and fulfilling simple requests. This reduces the workload for customer service agents, who can consequently focus their efforts on more complicated tasks.
51% of customers expect a business to provide instant services round the clock. 69% of customers are comfortable with chatbot support for basic issues. Providing chatbot support is essential not just to ensure customer satisfaction but also to reduce the workload for the live chat agents.
Some features of Zendesk Chat
Zendesk Chat comes with a robust set of features. These features ensure both customer satisfaction and visitor analytics. The following are some of the main features offered by Zendesk Chat.
- Chat client: A chat client facilitates direct communication between a customer and an agent. Zendesk Chat allows for customization, so an agent can pick their username and even upload a picture for more personable customer interaction.
- Chat agent console: This feature gives agents easy access to multiple features and shortcuts while interacting with a customer. This allows an agent to provide quick and satisfactory support to a customer.
- Appearance customization: Zendesk Chat provides customization for the chat widget, including colors and custom icons. This customization allows for integrating this chat support with the brand identity.
- Proactive chats & triggers: These features differ from regular chat support since they proactively initiate a chat with a customer based on context. For example, after browsing a site for a stipulated time, a chat pop-up may ask whether the visitor needs assistance. Such features boost customer retention by guiding the visitors, who may otherwise be hesitant while perusing a website.
- Canned messages: A collection of pre-composed messages allows agents to quickly respond to customer queries, while saving them the effort of typing a personalized message for each client. This ensures lower workload for the agents, as well as swift responses for the customers.
- Tracking & live analytics: Chat analytics compiles user data into reports, which you can use to track the efficacy of a particular service and further optimize it. Zendesk Chat produces a report every hour, providing regular and comprehensive trends.
- Offline mode: This feature allows customers to submit their queries when no agent is immediately available. You can save these queries in the chat history, and also forward them via email to the agent. Besides aiding in data collection, offline forms assure customers you will address their queries.
- Create chat protocols: Zendesk Chat allows for customizable chat protocols, depending on the business’s server capabilities and requirements. For a small-scale business, a protocol that facilitates simple chat would be sufficient, while a larger business may opt for further data-sharing functionality like images and videos.
These features and many more are subject to price packages. Costs range between $50-$150 per agent per month, with free trials available. Zendesk Chat offers something for every business.
Advantages of Zendesk Chat
While 60% of consumers expect an immediate response through live chat support, 95% of consumers also report that the quality of support is more important than response time. Having an integrated system that provides both live chat and chatbot support offers a business the best of both worlds. While customers looking for immediate responses can find satisfactory support through chatbots, those with more complicated requirements can easily be redirected to an available live chat agent.
Zendesk Chat provides an integrated system, ensuring customer engagement with proper implementation. Here are the advantages that Zendesk Chat provides to a given business.
- Saves time: 68% of customers prefer chatbots for their rapid support. The chatbot support offered by Zendesk Chat, through canned messages and proactive chats, works to ensure time-efficient resolution to save customers’ time.
- 24×7 support: The chatbot support and offline mode make Zendesk Chat available 24×7 for contact. Customers do not have to wait till business hours to send their queries.
- Data analytics: The tracking and live analytics provided by Zendesk Chat make it a valuable tool to study customer trends. It helps in data collection and compilation into graphs and statistics, whose conclusions can be implemented into other business strategies.
- Brand integration: Zendesk Chat provides customization not just for chat agent profiles but also for the chat widget and interface. With a range of icons and colors available, Zendesk Chat provides a chat feature perfectly integrated into the business’s brand identity.
- Real-time communication: The real-time chat possible through the chat client, along with a range of shortcuts available through the chat agent console, allow agents to provide instantaneous and personable support to customers.
- Helps with sales: Zendesk Chat offers the satisfaction of live chat support, along with the swift functionality of chatbot support. Coupled with the customer retention provided by proactive chat, and better business practices determined through data analytics, Zendesk Chat is an invaluable supplement to sales.
Conclusion
Zendesk Chat is an important asset for any business to provide online customer service. With more and more customers relying on e-commerce, having a tool to efficiently interact with a customer is of prime importance. With a well-developed integration of chatbot and live chat support, along with data collection and analytics, the features offered by Zendesk Chat are ensured to boost both sales and customer satisfaction.
At Kommunicate, we are envisioning a world-beating customer support solution to empower the new era of customer support. We would love to have you on board to have a first-hand experience of Kommunicate. You can signup here and start delighting your customers right away.
