A major characteristic of online shopping is the disconnection that exists between shoppers and any real people who can answer their questions or give answers to their questions in real time. However, thanks to live help, online shoppers can now have their questions answered and help offered. Because help through live chat is what online shoppers look forward to when shopping online, it becomes necessary that every online business has a live chat software on its site and there are a number of reasons why doing so important.

The convenience that live chat provides can not be ignored by online business owners. In addition to providing instant help and assistance in real time, online shoppers find dealing with a live person more convenient than dealing with call center personnel who can take minutes before offering help. Indeed, consumer studies undertaken by ATG Global Consumer Trend have established that online shoppers are more likely to return to shop from websites that offer live chat than sites without the same.

Operating an online business can at times be very expensive, which calls for the need for any online business owner to cut down on operation costs. The most effective way of achieving this is by making use of live chat software. It has indeed been proven that making use of live chat software cuts call center costs by as much as 35% by reducing interaction time. Furthermore, live chat enhances efficiency by making it possible for chat agents to handle several chats at the same time. This in effect eliminates the need of having more chat agents.

One thing that every business person strives to achieve is to make as make as many sales as possible. That is the only way a business can be self-sustaining with increased possibility of expanding. There is no doubt that live chat makes it possible for any online business owner to realize enhanced sales taking into account the fact that online shoppers have a live person who walks them through a sale in case of any questions or confusion. This in effect ensures that all that is in a shopper’s shopping cart proceeds to check out.

It is a fact that any business that needs to succeed need to remain above the completion and the best way for any online business to remain above the competition is to make use of live chat software. The fact that only shoppers to choose to shop from business websites that offer live chat means that only business websites that offer live chat are able to beat the competition.

Although that powerful in enhancing performance of any online business, installation of live chat software does not automatically yield positive results. Effective use of Live chat software requires well trained chat agents who are not only competent but also customer friendly. Chat agents must be knowledgeable about a business in order to serve existing and potential clients well. In addition, every online business owner must make use of analytics to determine what times online shoppers visit his/her business site to shop with the aim of capitalizing on the same.

You definitely cannot ignore the need for enhanced customer service when it comes to online business. Any visitor to your business website certainly has a reason for visiting and will obviously love to have a helping ‘hand’ when the need to have some of his/her questions and concerns addressed. This is why live chat software becomes a very important online business tool.

The benefits of integrating live chat software in your business website are many. From the outset, using live chat software allows you or your chat agents to respond quickly and in real time to chat visitor questions and concerns. You also have the ability to build long-term business relationship with your chat visitors in addition to increased possibility of increasing your conversion rate-the number of chat visitors you are able to retain. Using live chat software is also a very cost effective way of attending to your customers.

The fact that are many live chat software in the market does not mean that any software will enhance the level of service you offer your chat visitors and this is where Livehelp chat software comes in. This is not like any other chat software. It comes along with powerful features that really provide for the level of service that chat visitors look forward to receiving.

One of Livehelp software’s strong points is its intrusion, virus protection, and firewall protection capability. There is no doubt that visitors to your business website and your chat visitors look forward to shopping in a secure environment, something that the software provides for. The software is designed to analyze all in-coming calls and outgoing data, in effect preventing any attacks that can compromise security of information relating to your chat visitors when they shop. The software makes use of both HTTP and HTTPS protocols in addition to employing Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology in securing visitor personal information.

The level of customer service you provide using a live chat software is to a large extent determined by the number of tasks your chat agents can accomplish at any given time. Ideally, an effective live chat software should be capable of allowing your chat agents to accomplish different tasks at the same time. This is one area where Livehelp chat software ranks above set industry standards. Unlike other live chat software, Livehelp chat software’s agent console tops the others since its design allows different chat agents in the same application to undertake different roles under the same account. Simply put, the software makes it possible for different chat agents to access the system in different ways using different controls.

Live chat visitors do not only need security of their information. They also need to be assured of privacy and will consider such as a valuable service. Using Livehelp.com's chat software provides for enhanced privacy since it allows for configuration of passwords to correspond to corporate policy on use of passwords. Such details as password history, length, complexity and password expiry can easily be configured for enhanced privacy, which goes a long way in enhancing customer service.
When you’re engaged in a live help chat, there are several factors that ensure there is outstanding customer service.

When you’re engaged in a live help chat, there are several factors that ensure there is outstanding customer service.

1 – Response Time

One of the easiest ways to better a customer’s experience is to shorten the response time. If your customer has to wait several minutes for each answer to their question, they’ll regard that has a bad experience. Ensure that the response time you give the customer is the quickest one possible. They’ll be most appreciated of the experience.

2 – Canned Responses

This is the easiest way to give customers a large amount of text. The canned responses can be recalled by pressing the hash key (#) and the tag for the particular response you want, regardless of how long or short it is.

If you find yourself using a specific response to the same question, add that to the canned response list. After all, it’ll be convenient for later Live Help chat sessions.

Here Are Some Tips to Using Live Help Efficiently

Live Help can increase your e-marketplace’s potential, if it’s executed correctly. Here are some important tips to ensure that you make the most out of the Live Help Chat software:

• Avoid “robotic” responses. The whole point of having live help available, is to provide a warm, human voice to a customer's online shopping experience. Automated greetings or responses can kill the effectiveness of live chat, and give consumers the impression that they are still dealing with an automated system.
• Provide cheat sheets and FAQs to improve customer service representative performance, and to make it easier for them to answer customer inquiries quickly and accurately.
• Proper Training is a must! Representatives should have a complete knowledge of your inventory, common customer complaints, and navigation of various features.
• If you have a problem sourcing local employees to cover off-peak hours, consider outsourcing during those times.
• Consider hiring customer service agents that also have a significant amount of sales experience. By combining inside sales, and customer service representatives, a company can reduce staffing costs, and use Live Help to its full potential. Employees that have sales experience will be more likely lead customers towards sales, and increase the possibility of upselling additional products.
• Don’t forget Social Media! When live help agents receive positive feedback from online visitors and customers, instruct your representatives to, nicely, encourage your visitors to “LIKE” your Social Media pages, and/or leave a comment.
• At times you will experience a dramatic increase in online chat volume. Customers will inevitably have brief wait times, however, being prepared for this increased volume will ensure that a representative will be with them quickly, if not immediately.
• Provide your customers with helpful, easy to use chat features, like the ability to modify color, rate chat conversation, and the availability to request a transcript of the entire chat.
• Be aware of your peak retail hours. If you own an East Coast retail e-marketplace, there is a very real chance that those customers will shop during different peak hours than West Coast shoppers. Use site analytics to determine peak shopping hours for your site, and staff customer service while the most visitors are using your site. Never assume when shoppers will be available, without looking into your websites statistical information.

Livehelp agents are those who are responsible for dealing with the customers’ questions and helping their clients. We can categorize them into three different types, considering their work. They are sales agents, who are ready to convert their visitors into clients; agents who help their clients; and agents who perform both of these tasks. So if you are a beginner in this profession, this article will help you to start performing as a live chat agent. We are going to discuss some tips and tricks for beginners, which might be helpful for some experienced Livehelp agents, too.

There is some etiquette one must follow as a live chat agent. This list simply includes friendly behavior, exchanging names, understanding and managing communication issues, avoiding detailed answers from the beginning, having a calm nature during discussion, and using your grammar techniques properly. Some important tips one should follow are:

1. Develop a people-centric philosophy:

A new beginner should understand the philosophy of people first and money later while making decisions. If your client wants to send something, then do it fast. Even if it costs a bit more for you, make it happen as soon as possible. It will let your clients trust your work responsibility more and increase the number of returning customers.

2. Keep track of your visitors:

Keep track of all your visitors and monitor if they are new customers or returning visitors. This will also help you to deal with these two different types of clients.

3. Use targeted and initiated chat:

A customer will not always be initiative when starting a chat, so being an agent, you should take the responsibility to initiate the chat. There might be instances when customers will refuse to engage in a live chat session with you, but that’s completely fine. It’ll also convey a sense of goodwill to your customers sometimes. Let the customer browse your entire website properly before engaging them in a live chat so that they are able to get oriented with your website first.

4. Help from the typing indicator:

The typing indicator assists the agent to visually see what a customer is typing in a Livehelp chat session. It’ll help the agent to understand what the customer is thinking and going to ask, which alerts the agent to respond even more quickly with a proper and detailed answer. The chat agent should also be alerted when the customer hits send or enters his/her complete query. This alert should be visible, audible, or both so that a busy agent is interrupted and knows that a customer is waiting for a response or answer. Being a chat agent, you should be comfortable with multitasking, as you might be chatting with multiple customers and dealing with different types of questions simultaneously.

5. Pre-chat surveys:

Basically, pre-chat surveys are surveys that are shown to visitors of site before chat comes up in order to gather important information from visitors so the agent knows more about them. For example, customers can provide their name, contact details, and a short description about their question so that a Livehelp chat agent can understand the question before starting to chat with customer and forward this query to the most qualified agent to handle the conversation.

It is a good idea to show a form to the customer and ask them some basic questions. Do not ask too many questions; ask only questions which will help you to set the direction for the conversation. Use the form’s responses to forward this query to an agent for a quick answer.

6. Transfer chat conversation when required:

A chat agent should not be required to know everything. Each agent has different levels and areas of expertise, which can be used depending on the questions of customers. If there is a situation where a question is asked by the customer that is not of your expertise, you should quickly transfer the customer to another agent who has expertise to resolve the question. Agents should also ensure that the customer is aware of the chat transfer so that they can respond accordingly.

7. Attitude of chatting:

The attitude of chatting or dealing with customers is also very important for Livehelp chat agents. You should be trained properly to handle the different questions and to deal with customers of different natures and attitudes. You should be able to handle conversations properly and provide direction for your chat conversations. Agents that work in a support department are trained with knowledge of their product and also confident to have a successful online Livehelp chat session. If you have no idea of which chat style you should use with a customer, stick with the formal chat style.

8. Skills, experience, and knowledge:

The agents with a ready-to-learn nature will improve their skills with every engaged conversation. To improve such skills, you should read customer service-related articles and blogs. Livehelp chat agents typically could engage in 4 to 6 concurrent chats. This usually is a developmental skill to be able to have the ability to assist many customers simultaneously.

Do not try to overthink any questions; try to provide the simplest solution to customers. Sometimes, the simplest solution resolves a customer's problem.

Simple solutions can be discussed very quickly, and customers love to engage a chat session in which they are getting prompt replies regularly without waiting for long periods of time.

Use your previous chat experience when dealing with your customers. Your chatting skills will be improved only through live chat experiences with different questions and customers with different chatting attitudes and natures. Greet your customer professionally and offer them solutions they can understand easily. Your grammar skills also need to be very perfect in order to handle a customer with a good mindset.

The canned messages feature will also help when you are engaged in a Livehelp chat session. The canned messages are carefully worded, standardized lists of sentences which could be sent directly to your customers using shortcuts. We encourage and strongly recommend not sending many canned messages or responses to a customer; otherwise, it’ll make them think that they are talking to a computer rather than a human.
Conclusion

These are the tips a new live help chat agent should follow or an experienced team leader should follow to coach their new live help chat agents. These tips will be helpful to all agents no matter which type of work they are doing, either dealing with new clients, returning visitors, or handling queries of customers and working for a support company. Always be ready to learn from your chat experience and improve your skills for better chats in the future. Being a new agent, try to communicate in a formal way, and after getting more and more experience, you’ll have a lot of chatting style which can be used from time to time.

Now that you are familiar with the Chats section, you can now do your first chat. There are some things you need to remember when dealing with customers.

1 - Preparation Is Key

This is necessary when it comes to your ability to answer your customers’ questions as well as your knowledge of the product(s).

2 – Concentration

It’s important you keep focused on the matter at hand. If you are to solve a customer’s case, you need to give them short, concise answers right away.

3 – Stay Calm

Should something go wrong at some point – and chances are good that it’ll happen from time to time – then admit the mistake, apologize and continue to try solving the issue. When you have doubts, there is just one question to ask yourself, “Will what I do make my customer happy?” When you stay focused on the customer, you’re bound to have better results and can cope with difficult-to-handle situations.

The chat service offered by Livehelp.com is a powerful instrument that numerous companies – large and small – use to ensure their websites are user-friendly. While the chat service is regarded more for its ability to better online customer service, it can also help with keeping users engaged and increasing sales.

7 Important Etiquette Tips To People To Use Live Help Correctly

Now, when you use the Livehelp chat service, there are several important tips you must keep in mind to ensure the experience is a pleasant one.

1 – Give Names

The most basic tip of all seven for the involved parties is to give each other’s names. For the chat representative, this is so important because people often feel they’re not talking to a live person when engaged in a chat conversation. One way to start the chat includes: “Good day. My name is David. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking to today?” This gives the chat a little more personal touch that can ensure both parties have a fruitful Live Help session.

2 – Be Friendly

When talking on Live Help chat, it’s important to be friendly (this goes for both the business representative and customer). Make sure the communication stays positive, which can be difficult to do. According to various studies, people will react in a negative manner even when the sender hasn’t meant to steer it that direction.

Remember this little phrase, “positive is neutral and neutral is negative”. When someone has answered a question for you, be sure you say something positive about it such as, “Thank you for answering the question. It’s most appreciated.” If you answer with a simple “thanks” or “okay”, it comes across as impolite.

3 – Miscommunication Is Common

When it comes to chatting online, miscommunication is quite common. There are three things to keep in mind to ensure there is no miscommunication.

• You should never try to be sarcastic. While joking around is an effective way to lighten up the serious tone in a chat, the problem stems from the fact that sarcasm can be misinterpreted.
• When it comes to Live Help, each party has their own agenda. The customer needs information and wants their questions answered. The agent is there to help the customer get what they need and ensure the user has a satisfying experience. When you know what the party is looking for from the chat, there can be no miscommunication.
• Don’t joke around on during a Livehelp chat. Like sarcasm, jokes can be misconstrued in a way not meant to be. In fact, some people may see a joke as an insult, which could make the chat season become a negative experience. Therefore, don’t joke around when in a Live Help chat session. Even if you mean it in good fun, it may not be seen that way.

4 – Put Attention On Answer, Details Later On

When it comes to responding to customer inquiries, it’s best to be as in-depth as possible. When you do, it shows that you genuinely care about the customer and are making an effort to help them. It’s best to respond in a polite, concise manner without adding more details to the equation unless it’s absolutely necessary. Consider the two examples of a Live Help session – which one would you rather have?

Example 1

Visitor – “Where can the checkout page be found?”
Agent – “On the navigation bar, it’s at the top right hand of the screen.”

Example 2

Visitor – “Where can the checkout page be found?”
Agent – It’s interesting that you ask but our checkout page can be found by clicking on several links on the website. If you scroll up to the website’s header, you’ll see a sign up link. You can also find it on the features page as well as on the navigation bar to the right.”

If you see in example two, the chat representative is both supportive and helpful but wordy. The representative isn’t giving the user a straight answer, which may cause the user to decide to go elsewhere. Details are good, but when it comes to Live Help sessions, the shorter the answer, the better off everyone is.

6 – Don’t Yell (CAPS LOCK)

When you go into a store, you don’t yell at someone to get your question answered. After all, you’re not going to get the interaction you want. Well, the same situation applies to Live Help chat sessions. When it comes to the customer representative, shouting at customers often means getting fired. Nobody wants to be yelled at, even if they want their side of view heard. People don’t like being yelled at.

Customers: It’s reasonable to assume you’re upset and aggravated, and need a little help.
Agents: When customers yell at you, politely ask them if they accidentally hit their caps lock button.

7 - Spelling and Grammar Are Necessary

Look at the Live Help setting as a business engagement, not a friendly text message to your friends. Talk to your visitors on Live Help as if you’re going to send a business email to a co-worker. Stay professional, and be mindful of the spelling and grammar mistakes.

When you keep these seven etiquette tips in mind when using Live Help chat, you’re going to experience a much better session that proves to be both successful and productive.

When it comes to online shopping, many customers feel a strong “Us VS Them” mentality when it comes to answering questions, or getting quality customer service. This is especially true when it comes to real-time interactions with customer service. Why risk losing customers, when it has become increasingly easy to add live, and precise, customer service chat & support? Live Help has the ability to provide convenient, real-time answers, to a consumers customer service needs. All without inflating a company’s staffing budget, or affecting its bottom line.

Let’s look into how Live Help can improve your business, and some tips on how to maximize customer service effectiveness.

1. Customers Love Live Help Chat

In this mostly digital age, customers still value help from a live person while shopping in the e-marketplace. Studies show that many online consumers prefer the option of having questions answered by a live customer service representative while shopping. One independent study suggests that this feature is one of the top services consumers look for when shopping online.

Why? Simply put, an online chat system provides customers with immediate access to help, wait times are often much less than when using a call center, and customers can easily multi-task while waiting for assistance. Additionally, Live Help chat also replaces the tediousness of dialing that old 800 number, and navigating through the endless maze of “press this” options.

Around 90% of customers consider Live Help chat as a fast and useful alternative. Emarketer.com recently released survey results that found 62% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers live customer service chat.

The report goes on to state,”Live chat cannot solve every e-commerce problem, however. ATG’s “Customer Service Survey” found US online shoppers preferred live help over the phone via click-to-call when dealing with sensitive or complicated information, technical problems or a large amount of money.”

2. Live Help Proves To Be Cost Efficient

Using independent research Live Help software has consistently demonstrated that it can save on both the amount of time a customer service representative spends on a given task, and the overall expense of using a standard telephone based service. Unlike telephony, with live help a single agent can engage with many customers simultaneously. This drastically lowers the cost per interaction and improves response times to address questions and concerns a customer may have.

Some of the most notable cost savings are:

• Live help reduces the overall average interaction costs.
• Live help increases agent efficiency by allowing them assist multiple customers simultaneously, reducing the need for more customer service agents.
• Agents spend less time interacting with customers via the phone. Waiting time is cut to a fraction of time by allowing agents to multi-task during chat conversations. Even more so when compared to a traditional call center.

3. Live Chat Increases Sales

The simple fact is, Live Help increases sales by engaging with customers at key moments in their online retail experience. Live Help can stop a customer abandoning the online shopping experience, using real-time, customer service driven help. The general consensus among users in marketing forums, blogs, is that Live Help will generally lead to improved sales and customer satisfaction. Don't let your customer be driven from your website by poor customer service interaction. Instead, offer them live customer service help, and ensure their repeat business.

ust like in a brick and mortar store, you are more likely to retain prospective customers if you are able to talk with the customer, and offer real time assistance. Live Help helps bridge the gap between the online marketplace and quality customer service. Ensuring the customer feels valued, and secure in their business transactions.

By engaging consumers in real time, each visitor feels valued, and you are building a lasting relationship between consumers and your unique brand.

4. Live Help Provides Brand Loyalty and Strong Customer Relationships

Internet consumers prefer Livehelp Chat over other customer service routes because it doesn’t disrupt the customer’s shopping experience. Users often comment on the lack of delay in service, such as what you would deal with using email based support. Giving the consumer what they want from a customer service representative helps create happy customers, brand loyalty and repeat business.

Online shoppers simply prefer Live Help to the phone based customer service!

TELUS International has recently released study results, which have seen multiple top retailers are still not providing chat based customer service. This is essential for companies that are still trying to build a business and reputation. In the future, this Live Chat feature will be a key component for websites that wish to stand out above the competition.

“Almost two in 10 live chat respondents did more than 75% of their holiday shopping online, compared with 14% of those who did not chat. A further 25% of chatters made 51% to 75% of their purchases on the Web, versus just 10% of those who did not participate in the chat service.”

Live help bridge the gap between the old way of conducting business and the convenience and impersonal nature of today’s online commerce. Through live help software, you can save money on customer service, increase your leads, and give your business many other profitable advantages over your competition.

5. Live Help Provides Instant Leads

A frustrated customer, whose needs have yet to be filled, may turn to social media to vent about their recent experience. This is commonly called a “pain point”, and marketing teams regularly “mine” social media, and message boards, for these pain points. Online marketers, and other industry leaders know the value in turning these pain points into profits. Using those points as reference, they can adapt content and use it to the benefit of advertisers and future customer’s.

These live help features provide instant access to customers’ pain points, and our customers have the ability to use this unique experience to get real-time answers regarding all of their customer service inquiries, all while working hand in hand with customer service agents.. Additionally, customers can ensure that a product will ship & arrive online, or that a promotion or coupon will provide the discounts they advertise.

In addition, as Live Help representatives talk to customers, they can receive immediate feedback on ways to improve a company’s products and services. Properly addressed pain points can turn into sales opportunities. Potential customers who are willing to contact your business before purchasing are much more likely to convert.

Conclusion

If your online business is not taking opportunity of Live Help software as part of its customer service solution, you're missing extremely valuable opportunities to help grow your business and make customers happy. Prevent shopping cart abandonment and missing sales, building strong customer relationships, and future leads. Start by integrating and using live help within your organization today.

Operating an online business requires that you put in place an effective online communication system of which live help or chat is the system that most online shoppers prefer because it provide for instant help. Although very effective and indeed very helpful, online shoppers are usually concerned about their safety and in particular their personal information that share while shopping. Vast amount of internet users are very conscious regarding sharing their personal information on the web. here is no doubt that this trend will continue as more online shoppers realize the need to protect their personal information. This makes it very necessary that online business owners choose online communication systems after due diligence. This also applies to live help or live chat communication. Just what level of privacy and security does your live help or live chat software provide?

You definitely cannot ignore the need for a very secure live help software if you need to grow your business by retaining existing customers and making your brand stand out. That security is not limited to securing your online credit card transactions; it extends to securing all forms of data in addition to making such data private.

Anti-Virus, Intrusion, and Firewall Protection

Our infrastructure security is very effective in preventing intrusion and virus attacks through its security systems that also includes firewall solutions. Livehelp’s security features analyze all incoming and outgoing data passing through the system. Livehelp’s security configurations are not only strong but are also audited on a regular basis by use of established system standards as set by PCI Security Standards (PCI), Center for Internet Security (CIS), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

We continuously assess vulnerability of our internal and external systems. Our monitoring team is tasked with the responsibility of monitoring our system security, performance, availability and reliability with any noted issues reported instantly to our Livehelp Operations Team for immediate action.

Security & Privacy

Livehelp's chat system (software) uses both HTTP and HTTPS protocols for communication and data exchange. Our software services rely on Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology in protecting your personal information. This it does using server authentication and data encryption. The system ensures that only authorized and registered users can access data. In addition, our application security model requires that your user identity corresponds to every request you present to Livehelp server.

In order to enhance privacy, Livehelp’s live chat software provides that communication between visitors and agents is not communicated over the Internet directly. Instead, such communication channeled through off0site servers that are otherwise very secure. Monitoring of such communication is continuous during processing by use of enterprise grade firewalls, intrusion detection systems and application content filters. Monitoring ensures that maximum security is available all the time.

Information Security

Livehelp complies with the following information security and monitoring procedures:

• Documented and established security standards and employee confidentiality.
• Training on internal security policies and raising of security awareness as a continuous process.
• Elaborate verification of employees with access to customer data.
• Customer information is only accessed by employees who need to work with customer data.
• Employees can only access customer data within 24 hours.

Both physical security provided by data centers and hosting by Livehelp.com is designed to meet the following specifications:

• 24/7 security at server locations with only authorized employees allowed to access to servers.
• Well-secured rooms whose access is protected by key-cards, 24/7 surveillance, guards and computer room badge-in.
• Storage of backed-up customer data is both on-site and off-site at well-secured locations.
• All flawed components at the data center are addressed through an elaborate procedure before any component is physically destroyed.
• Uninterrupted power and internet is supplied on-site with fire protection mechanisms implemented.

Chat Security

Standard for Livehelp’s agent consoles ranks above set industry standards. Livehelp’s design makes it possible for different roles played by different employees to be designated under a single account. This simply means that each employee accesses the system differently with different control capabilities. Agents also have the option of enforcing secure HTTPS (SSL) protocol for encryption of communication data.

Privacy

Livehelp makes use of password policy that can be set to correspond with your corporate policy on use of passwords. All your password history, length, complexity and expiry can be configured for maximum privacy. In addition, storage of all your personal and confidential information is by use of secured servers with transmission of the same well protected through SSL encryption.

These are just but a few of Livehelp’s chat security and privacy technology and processes. We no doubt are ready and willing to help in case you realize that your live chat software is not all that secure.