What is a pre chat survey and why is it important?

A pre chat survey is kind of a form given to customers, before engaging them in conversation. Many e-commerce websites that provide online support services in UAE and rest of the world, ask their customers to fill up this survey form before proceeding further. Many e-commerce gurus consider that pre chat survey is an important step in any live chat conversation. Here are some reasons why pre chat surveys are important:

To gather information about customers
Although live chat software has advanced features that can tell you a lot about customers including their personal information, essential for your business. How much information you get depends upon the kind of questions you ask. It also depends upon the kind of business you run. Whether you want detailed information or just an email address, a pre chat survey can help you gaining information about your customers.

To filter out your visitors

A pre chat survey would also enable you to filter out the right customers. It would help you distinguish between serious customers and pranksters and bullies. Only those customers who are interested in buying your products will make an effort to fill a survey, while those who just want to waste your time will not find it worth the effort.

To assist customers on a personal level

Gaining personal information about the customers will help you assist them on personal level. By asking customers about their attributes, interests and preferences you can guide them about the products that ideally suit them and their lifestyle. For example, many travel websites ask their customers about their interests and lifestyle and suggest them places for vacations which suit their interest.

To analyze your customers

Although live chat support software has a real time monitoring feature, but a pre chat survey gives you a detailed analysis of the kind of customers who buy from you. Getting a hold on the type of customers, you want to serve will be a great help. It will assist you in devising the best possible marketing strategies for your website.

To help you remember customers and stay in touch with them

A pre chat survey will also help you remember your customers and stay connected with them. You can send information about the new deals on your web store to your customer via email. And when they return to your website for shopping again you can take a step towards creating a long lasting cordial relation with them.

A pre chat survey is an important step in any live chat conversation and must be applied by anyone who offers live chat services.

4 Ways Live Chat Improves Your Online Communication

Communication is the beginning of relation with your customers. Although, in a typical brick and mortar store, vendors or sales persons can have a face-to-face communication with every coming customer; but when it comes to online businesses, communicating with customers becomes a tough task. Retailers have to take the edge of slow responding emails and high costing telephone helplines. Responding your customers through emails or phone calls usually annoys them, by making them stand in long waiting queues.

Therefore, to conduct an effective and smooth communication with your customers, you need to integrate live chat software in your website through which you can establish an easy and smooth connection between you and your customers.

Here is how live chat software improves your online communication.

1. Quick Communication Reduces Hassle

Using live chat, you can communicate with your customers easily, smoothly and quickly, either by proactively approaching them or by responding to their chats. To provide a quicker response of general questions, your chat reps can use canned messages. You do not need to make your customers wait for their turns because the multitasking feature of this chat application enables your single rep to handle multiple chats simultaneously.

2. Seamless Communication Leaves No Question Unanswered

By deploying live chat support on your website, you can conduct a textual one-on-one conversation with all of your customers. The seamless conversation enables you to leave none of your customers' questions unanswered or unresolved. This way, you can increase customers' satisfaction and trust in your products and services.

3. Respond to Your Customers in their Native Languages

When you provide online services, you come across customers from all across the globe speaking different languages. In such situation, language could become a barrier in serving the worldwide customers, but the multilingual feature of online chat allows your customer service rep to serve international customers in the language they can easily speak and understand.

4. Real Time Response and Personalized Response

Personalization always pleases a customer as it makes him feel more valued. Using live support, your chat reps can provide real-time and personalized responses to every customer on your website.

This is how live chat improves your online business communication largely. The improved communication in-turn casts an enhanced image of your service. Along with increasing your online clientele, it helps you develop a strong customer relationship. Moreover, it also earns you lifelong customers, who later become your brand advocates.

File Sharing Feature of Live Chat Software - A Good Option for Improved Live Support

Sometimes, the one-on-one text-based conversation does not prove enough to satisfy your customers' queries and the chat session keeps on extending instead of entering into a conclusion. Why does this happen? Although, this is not going to happen all the time but there are some occasions when wavering customers come across some complications where they want to have detailed and clear information about a product. The detail can even go this lengthy that it can consume a lot of operators' precious time. Therefore, handling such queries or customers especially during the busy hours, becomes difficult as it hampers their multi-tasking to a great extent.

Thus, being engaged with a single customer, an operator may lose many others, who could have generated more revenues for your business. Here is where an operator must take the edge of file sharing feature of live chat software.

Transfer Multiple Informative Documents

Depending upon the type of queries, a live chat operator can transfer files in form of images, files, folders or any other document. Almost all types of files except executable (.exe) files can be sent through the chat software and dashboard. Normally, the maximum limit of sending files is 5mb. A chat operator can send multiple files simultaneously but the total limit cannot exceed beyond 5mb. However, depending upon the type and version of live chat software, file transferring range may increase or decrease accordingly. Images are sent when a customer wants to have a closer look of a particular product that is not possible to explain in a text-based conversation. The link of the file and thumbnail impression is automatically saved in your chat history.

Ease both for Operators as well as Customers

Sharing files is also important in a way that it lets operators do more in the limited time. Instead of getting pulled in long debates with customers that can sometimes create a miserable situation, the chat operators can transfer files that help them work in a flow while maintaining their multi-tasking capabilities. On the other hand, customers neither need to wait long for getting their issues resolved nor do they need to go to multiple support agents for getting online support service. Transferred files are also important for your customers in way that these can help them save the data (files, pictures, documents, invoices) in their system that can be used for assistance even after the chat session is over.

One thing, the operators should keep in mind that they should transfer selected files that carry useful, accurate and precise information and not irrelevant details, which may give an impression to your customers as they are just being stopped by the bombardment of information.