This blog post is the second part of our three-part series (the first part is here) on building and maintaining strong relationships with customers who prefer live chat. In the first part of our series, we focused on the pre-conversation efforts of setting yourself up for successful chat interactions with customers. For this part, we’ll focus on how the actual chat conversation impacts the customer relationship.

Part 2 – During the conversation

  • Place an increased importance on excellent writing – When you’re working with customers who communicate with your company primarily or fully through chat, creating clear and concise messages is essential. B2B support agents are the front-line voice of your company and, given the timeliness of chat, agents can’t always ask a manager to review a response. Obviously, fundamentals like spelling and grammar matter, but what’s essential is being crystal clear in your customer communication. Don’t rely on pronouns (it, them, etc.) and instead spell out company and product names when appropriate. Communicating clearly cuts down conversation time and improves the relationships your business has with customers.
  • Provide a chat solution with screen sharing – There are times, especially for software and technology companies, where a solution that could take 20 minutes to explain over chat can be shown to the customer in two minutes via screen share. This is when an agent or customer shares their computer screen so both parties can work via a joint screen to explain the solution to an issue. It may not have a place in all chat conversations, but when needed this customer support feature provides great value to creating an awesome experience.
  • Implement a chat solution with live video – Sometimes a screen share just doesn’t make sense. If you’re a B2B company with a lot of physical products, switching to a solution that supports video can be another way for support teams and customers to communicate more efficiently. For example, if a customer has a wiring issue with their lighting structure, an agent can go record a quick video of what the wiring should look like, upload it to the chat, and share it with the customer. This is yet another way to turn what would have been a long text conversation via chat into a short exchange, which makes the whole exchange more positive and more efficient!
  • Simplify how agents find self-service content via chat – As an agent, one of the more frustrating experiences is when you know exactly how to solve a customer’s issue, but you can’t find the right documentation to send them. Articles and documents exist in multiple locations (only some of which are easily searchable) and the customer is sitting there waiting for a response. It turns what should be a positive customer experience into a negative one. Instead, companies should leverage a single self-service solution that’s connected directly to their customer chat. This way, agents never have to leave the chat to find self-service articles and they can get the required resources to the customers much faster.

We hope you enjoyed Part 2 of our series as much as Part 1! Keep an eye out for Part 3 on how follow-up after the conversation based on the information acquired from chat can make all the difference in strengthening customer relationships.