Why Trends Demand To Integrate Live Chat Feature In Your App?

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Most of us already acquired the habit of reaching out for the handheld device for any reason. Consumers have the uncanny knack of finding everything on mobile. But even the mobile user experience now demands to be more fluid, intuitive and instantly gratifying than ever before. Instead of taking the pain to dial a number they prefer chatting instantly through the app, without even switching the app screen. This gave rise to the popularity of live chat feature in apps.

Live Chat
Live Chat

There are several key benefits of using live chat features within mobile apps. This feature offers a ready to use tool for the audience to make queries and get help in real-time. Let us have a look at the most important benefits offered by live chat features in apps.

Live Chat Support Is Smarter Than A Phone Call Or Email

Obviously providing a number for people to call and get their queries solved is a reliable way to provide support to your users or customers. But if you think, mobile support means only allowing the customers to make a call to customer care, you are not aware of mobile support at all.

These days, for the vast majority of purposes people don’t just make calls and instead, they prefer alternate communication. Thanks to the popularity of instant messaging apps people increasingly prefer texting or voicing messages instead of making calls. Similarly, e-mail communication now has lost popularity as they take as long as half a day to fetch a reply. This is precisely why chat messaging for support became so popular among commercial apps. The best thing about this feature is that it works everywhere without any limitation or constraint.

Various studies indicated that chat messaging is something people actually associate smartphones with. For many people texting messages to friends and connections takes hours of time every day. This is why live chat support actually emerged as an option that people actually want to use. According to the study report by ATG Global Consumer Trend, a whopping 90% of considered live chat support as helpful and effective for mobile apps.

Thanks to mobile live chat, the support staff can easily get in touch with the customers instead of the surrounding noise or other distractions that the customer needs to pass. Moreover, unlike email or social support, the support here is literally instant and there is no waiting time.

Live Chat In-App Feature is Futuristic

Live chat customer service response time graph

Live chat allows an individual customer to get in touch with a company or business directly without almost any waiting time or communication difficulty. This for the app users is doubly beneficial, as without leaving the app at all they engage with the brand can make the queries solved.

When it comes to the point of view of the app owners or app admin, the feature always allows them to provide customer support in real-time and this boost engagement and business conversion.  Quicker response rate creates a mood in customers to get instant responses from the app.

  • In-app Customer Support

In-app customer support mechanism offered through live chat feature is not just about allowing customers to make instant queries and getting replies. In-app chat support Aldo allows customers to carry out small transactions as well.

You basically have two options to provide chat support to your customers. Either you partner with another chat app platform as soon as you opt for chat support you are taken to another third-party chat app or link page. On the other hand, you can build chat support for your app from the ground up.  You can take chat-SDK from Acquire for incorporating in-app chat features directly in your app.

When you link another app or web page with the promise of providing live chat support, the chat action takes longer to complete and at the same time due to poor network conditions you may not be able to send messages as well. For all these reasons, there cannot be a better alternative than having own chat support feature if the app. Normally customer service response time for email communication is on an average 17 hours. In comparison, the live chat takes just 2 minutes or less to respond.

  • Augmented Customer Experience

The best way to engage customers and boost sales from them is to deliver a pleasant and smooth user experience to them. Moreover, app users extremely tend to prefer customization and personalized aspects. For query solving also they always want to feel privileged. This is exactly where live chat support allows customers to have an optimum user experience.

Optimum user experience with live chat
Optimum user experience with live chat

Moreover, to ensure better and more augmented user experience, the live chat Data can further be utilized and researched to gain insights that can make the app user experience better over time. Live-chat support also helps to get in-depth browsing history and relevant user insights to deliver personalized suggestions. This is particularly useful for eCommerce apps. Live chat also helps to get customer feedback without carrying out surveys or customer research. Such insight-loaded customer Data can be used to deliver a better customer experience.

  • Great Marketing Advantages

Besides appeasing customer queries and guiding them with pleasant real-time support, live chat support by processing user information and in-app behavior information can actually assess the triggers and lead generation opportunities.

A live chat function within an app can always help a company to ask the users about their feedback and opinions about particular products or services. In effect, they can only create more interest and make people more engaged with the app. Through a live chat support app, an organization can keep a close tap on the preferences and choices if their target audience.

  • Higher Business Conversion

Higher business conversion is probably the most important rationale behind the popularity of live chat support among most commercial apps. The in-app live-chat feature by providing optimum customer experience ensures optimum scope for business conversion.

The logic behind this is simple. As customers get instant and satisfactory replies to all their queries and as they don’t need to go elsewhere for the replies, they literally have a positive first impression about the app and its product offerings. This precisely makes them opt for purchases.

live chat support features for mobile apps

Live chat feature without causing any distraction or unnecessary confusion just gives a solution to the customer problems in real-time and without the slightest delay. This is why it has been observed that live chat among all communication channels has the highest rate of satisfaction. This customer satisfaction results in better sales or business conversion.

  • Bring Down Negative Reviews

It has been seen that the vast majority of negative reviews across various online platforms are mainly generated due to customer dissatisfaction about customer support or bad user experience. With live chat support, the app can proactively engage with the audience and reduce the dissatisfaction about user experience to a great extent.

Secondly, live chat by reducing the response time to a great extent actually helps to build trust and reliability for the app. This ultimately reflects in the positive reviews posted by the customers on different channels.

  • Outreaching Customers Far and Wide

It is a well-known fact that thanks to the live chat feature customers can connect to a business brand instantly. Naturally, this can be utilized by online brands as a great tool to reach audiences far and wide. This is something many online businesses are not fully aware of.

Live Chat Service
Live Chat Service

We now have an array of sophisticated live chat software that can help support the team to reply queries and engage in chatting with visitors as well. This becomes possible by tracking the visitor as he visits a page. As soon as a visitor visits a particular page or shows a specific behavior, the software by following the pre-set rule can send him a message. Such kind of proactive and adaptive marketing is also a great outcome of in-app live chat.

  • Competitive Lead

Finally, with so many advantages punched in live chat enjoys a lot of competitive advantages as well. As most businesses still did not jump on the bandwagon of the live-chat revolution, starters can have a great competitive edge in the market. A recent study indicated that less than 10% of websites still now provides real-time support with live chat. So, the market is still pretty much virgin for any new app to take advantage of this feature.

When learning from the success of other businesses, we found some surprising statistics. In just the last 5 years, there has been at least a 20% increase in the number of online shoppers who use live chat support features. As an increasing number of companies are adopting this feature to meet demands, it already stands as a competitive element in the retail app and several other app niches.

Do you want to give your company’s business process and customer communication a distinct and progressive twist? Well, you cannot undermine the importance of live chat support if you want to stay relevant and innovative.

  • Better Monitoring and Quality Control

Reports and analytics are parts of any modern app that want to track user behavior, customer data, and various helpful metrics. The apps also need to evaluate the performance of their staff members and company employees.

Email support has limited accountability and hence you cannot evaluate what’s gone wrong in every instance. But with instant chat support you can evaluate deeper into things. Phone support requires large dedicated manpower that most small businesses and startups simply cannot afford. Moreover, without recording all phone calls the company cannot evaluate the performance of the employees.

Live chat support
Live chat support

Only when it comes to live chat support, the business can access and track all kinds of custom reports and customer histories for various agents. This precisely allows you to track multiple parameters including the number of visitors for your site, accepted or ignored requests and several other metrics. Through chat histories you can easily see the mistakes, support staff performance, wait time and different other aspects.

Principal Features for Any Successful Live Chat Support System

Do you want to use an in-app live chat solution for customer support of your app? Delivering in-app chat features in every post on app development tips, but barring a few features, most of the in-app chat elements are unknown to many of us. Well, though there are many advanced features, at least look for the below-mentioned features for customer support.

  • It should be able to deliver canned responses for replying to common queries. Canned responses are great to engage the audience until the agent needs to take over the conversation.
  • It should offer a frequently-ask-questions section to help answer questions related to the niche or for troubleshooting problems. FAQ responses work well to provide knowledge when an agent doesn’t require to engage.
  • A chat request ticket creation and management help users to stay in the queue for getting in touch with the support team, especially when the business hours are over. This also takes care of the automatic follow-ups seeking agent’s reply.
  • The ratings and reviews for the support agent to encourage or identify areas of improvement.
  • Tracking visitors so that the query can be better understood in the context of the visited page.
  • Integrated analytics to track the chat assisted sales.
  • Chat search terms, tags and keywords to detect common queries and issues.
  • Mobile app dashboard for monitoring chat conversation on-the-go.
  • Blocking and banning users to reduce the trolling people from causing unnecessary drainage of time.
  • Instant chat translation feature like Google Translate.
  • Transcription of email communication.
  • Long-term logging session or caching to prevent frequent login exercise during shopping.
  • The exporting capability of Chat log and chat data.
  • Capability to transfer chat conversation from one agent to the other. This will prevent the user from repeating the entire query and conversation.
  • Support for the Emojis and images within the chat. File uploading capability to help users describe anything with relevant visuals.

Conclusion

Apart from all the features mentioned above, there are still others that modern in-app chat support should embrace. This is why it is advisable to compare various such in-app chat features and how they can be built better.

Atman Rathod
Atman Rathod is the Co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading web and mobile app development company with 13+ years of experience. He loves to write about technology, startups, entrepreneurship and business. His creative abilities, academic track record and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well.

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