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5 ways live customer chat gives you a competitive advantage.

As a hot shot pilot in Top Gun, Tom Cruise’s character famously exclaimed, “I feel the need, the need for speed!” And that’s what your customers want when they reach out to your company for support. In fact, the NICE CX Transformation study found that the leading indicator of successful customer service is speed. So how do you deliver customer service at lightning speed? Enter live customer chat. 

What is live customer chat?

Powered by software connected to your company’s website, chat allows customer service agents to connect with prospects and customers in real time. Live customer chat can be used to resolve customer service issues, answer questions, and even guide a buyer through the purchasing process. But most importantly, live customer chat is one of the fastest and most personal customer service channels available.

How Can Chat Give Your Company a Competitive Advantage?

There are many advantages to addressing your customer’s needs in real time.

Here are some of the most meaningful ways that offering live customer chat can benefit your organization.

1. Give the customer what he (or she) wants

Customers increasingly seek chat as a preferred channel over phone calls, emails, and social media communities. By offering live customer chat, you’re ensuring that your customers have the support option they want.

2. Increase sales

By answering questions in real time, you instantly remove any obstacles along the purchasing path. This allows your buyers to complete their purchase and get on with their lives.

3. Drive satisfaction and loyalty

Because live customer chat allows your customer to report an issue or ask a question that can be resolved immediately, studies have shown that customer satisfaction levels increase and customer loyalty rises.

4. Live customer chat is efficient

Through a real-time, two-way conversation, chat is an extremely efficient customer service channel when it comes to addressing your buyer’s questions and concerns. But in addition to that, one customer service representative can typically manage four or five different chat sessions at once which also improves your team efficiency.

5. Chat is less expensive

Businesses find that the cost per transaction is much lower with live customer chat than other communication channels like a call center or social media community.

Learn more about how NICE can help you benefit from chat.

NICE CXone is leading a new era of Smart Digital Conversations by eliminating traditional barriers to exceptional omnichannel customer experiences with new innovations across your contact center operations. Learn how customers like Vera Bradley are transforming their contact centers, improving their KPIs, and exceeding their customers’ expectations by leveraging live customer chat as a customer service channel.

Any digital channel

Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels – even if you’re not there yet. How many SMS text messages go to your call center phone number with no response? Who’s trying to find you on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp and not finding you? Now with CXone it is easy to provide digital-first omnichannel service in all the channels your customers expect.

  • Personalized digital interactions: deliver native experiences in each of 30+ messaging channels, such as rich media, emojis, and other collaboration tools.
  • Simple to Activate: pre-integrated channels make it easy to offer to customers and agents.
  • Easy to Say “Yes”: simple packaging removes barriers to offering all channels to customers and agents.
CXone digital channel
Empowered agents

CXone empowers all your agents to deliver a true digital-first omnichannel customer experience by simultaneously combining all customer interactions in one intelligent inbox across multiple digital channels and voice for agents to select ("pull"), while dynamically prioritizing the most time-sensitive or real-time interactions according to service levels ("push"). All delivered in a single application – complete with full customer context, journey history, and sentiment.

  • Single Interface: one inbox for all digital messaging and real-time (voice/chat) channels – retaining native experience of each messaging platform.
  • Agents in Control: ‘pulling’ work in natural flow, while dynamic prioritization maintains SLAs – and prevents ‘cherry picking’.
  • Customer Card: full customer context, journey and conversation history, plus sentiment.
Holistic management

With CXone, omnichannel interactions are managed holistically, from agents to supervisors and beyond. Integrated workforce optimization, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence across digital and voice interactions ensure complete management across contact center operations.

Related resources
Case Studies

Best Practice: The Power of a Digital First Contact Center

Your customers have different preferences in how they want to contact your business. Hear from NICE customer, ESCI on how opening digital channels transformed their contact center, improved agent productivity and drive down costs for their contact center.

Learn more