Gartner: Best Practices for Making Live Chat a Must-Have Engagement Channel
Last updated February 5, 2016
Edmunds.com, a customer of Zopim (now Zendesk Chat), was featured in this Gartner report. Read on to find out more about Edmunds.com’s 24×7 multi-channel support.
There are so many ways people can chat or message each other every day: through Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, or apps like WhatsApp, SnapChat or WeChat. That’s why it comes as no surprise that live chat, as a digital customer service channel, is increasing in both popularity and usage.
According to an October 2015 report from Gartner: “Live chat is increasing in popularity as a preferred customer digital engagement channel, today representing 2% of overall interactions, and growing to 10% in 2018. By 2018, over 80% of companies will offer some form of live chat on their website or on mobile devices to interact with their customers.” However, implementing chat as a long-term strategy can be challenging.
In this report, Gartner analyst Brian Manusama makes the following recommendations:
- Craft the customer service journey and find the moments of truth in the digital touchpoints to proactively offer personalized live chat on your website and within your mobile apps.
- Position live chat as part of an overall long-term customer engagement strategy.
- Set up a comprehensive knowledge base to provide consistent responses and support multiple simultaneous chats.
- Articulate how you want to organize the handling of live-chat sessions in your customer engagement center.
- Understand the importance of the UI design for both customer and agent window alike.
- Start small—limit the number of scenarios where live chat becomes active, and continuously measure the performance of chat agents and their impact on customer experience.
The full report is no longer available for complimentary download. Read more about this and other Gartner research on the Gartner website.
You might also like this Gartner report about CRM customer engagement centers, which is available for complimentary download via Zendesk.
Gartner Best Practices for Making Live Chat a Must-Have Engagement Channel, Brian Manusama, 29 October 2015.
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