Live chat as a customer support tool! How does it score over the other customer support phenomenon?

Customer support has never been so as important as it is now, in this era of customer centricity. Customer support can be provided through the telephone, through email and through online chatting.

Call centers have become popular in recent years for their ability to respond to customer queries in real time over the standard telephone networks. Call centers have been a successful phenomenon but it has its own limitations (discussed later). Email support is asynchronous and hence cannot be compared to Telephone or chat based support. Live chat is for customer support is picking up as a concept as compared to call centers and customer support on the phone. There are several live chat tools available in the market, that enable an organization to chat with their website visitors in real time through their website.

There are several advantages that chat based support has over telephone based support.

1. Chat based customer support is far more cost effective that voice based support. In a call center, a customer support agent can handle only one call at a time. In a chat based contact center a customer support agent can handle more than one chat at a time. He can multiplex. Hence the agents are able to provide support to more customers in lesser cost and time.

1. A chat conversation enables a customer agent to send links, images and other digital information which assists him in providing customer support. For e.g. If an agent is explaining something about a Television to the customer, he can send some pictorial aids and links through the chat to make it easy for the customer to understand.

1. Chat based support makes it possible for people all over the world to interact freely. It does not impose any accent barriers in the communication.

Thus we see that chat based support is the most efficient and effective means of customer support.