It’s likely that you’ll be thinking about using a customer-facing chat feature, whether you want to improve an e-commerce website or offer a more individualised approach to assistance.
Although it’s essential to understand the differences between live chat and chatbots to achieve optimum client happiness, the ideal option for your business will rely on your objectives.
What differentiates a help desk from a live chat?
Describe Livechat.
As the name implies, Livechat is a live chat platform that businesses may use to connect customers with actual people. This offers a good chance to respond to more complicated queries, but it comes at the expense of hiring agents.
However, Livechat’s features are not restricted to pop-up windows on your website. Other support channels including Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, email, SMS, and a tonne more serve as a single hub for all of these.
Livechat: capabilities
You might see what the corporation refers to as “sneak peaks” depending on the channels you’re utilising. These enable agents to see what the user is typing in real time before hitting submit, enabling them to gather information more efficiently and ultimately offer responses more quickly.
It is feasible to use pre-written responses to answer frequently requested questions from customers, such as those about store hours or promotional codes, which can both save time and assure consistency. Interactive cards that can display photos and CTA buttons, or menus with quick reply buttons, will be useful for more in-depth messaging. Additionally, Livechat allows users to send items like documents, photos, and videos, preventing the need to divert client conversations to an email attachment or a download URL.
If a user enters the wrong chat, behind-the-scenes transfers can connect them with the correct team without them having to experience a break in connection. More advanced setup allows companies to automatically direct chat users to the right team based on the URL they land on (like sales and support). In order to better manage their workload, agents can also tag chats. A chat can display prior message history and permits emailing transcriptions whether it has been transferred or not.
We also appreciate Livechat’s customization features, which include branding and colour palette configuration for consistency’s sake, as well as profile image and name setup to provide consumers a more individualised experience.
Chat live: insights
Although some users could opt to participate in one of the post-chat questionnaires, Livechat also gathers a wealth of additional data to aid businesses in understanding and expanding their operations.
You can view statistics related to totals, missed chats, engagement, agent availability, duration, and response time for routine chats. Other insights are also revealed by support-based interactions, such as the number of new and resolved issues, the time it took for a client to receive their first response, and how soon the problem was fixed.
Overall, these kinds of statistics provide useful information into staffing projection so that you can always have the appropriate amount of agents available, which you may want to balance with an automated service like Chatbot.
Chat live: security
The 256-bit SSL protocol is used to encrypt all connections to the Livechat servers, and administrators can choose to employ European or American data centres. Along with other legal preparedness, this comes on top of GDPR compliance, HIPAA readiness, and other legal requirements.
It is possible to automatically conceal important information in the chat interface so that, even if a consumer writes their entire payment card number, just the final four digits will be shown. Additionally, if a user starts to cause a problem, they might be blocked.
In order to prevent unauthorised access, it is also possible to add trustworthy IP addresses for agent login. Two-factor authentication is also supported upon login, and single sign-on is supported for services like Google Sign-on, Okta, and Auth0.
A chatbot is what?
Chatbot, unlike Livechat, doesn’t use real people to converse with clients. Instead, it offers a platform for creating conversational chatbots, which employ machine learning and artificial intelligence to answer to users.
No coding knowledge is necessary for setup, and it is feasible to mix Chatbot with Livechat to provide a balance of autonomy with a more individualised, in-depth approach. Both the pop-up window on a business’s website and other third-party platforms like Messenger are compatible with it.
Chatbot: attributes
A chatbot can be operational 24/7/365 and assist an unlimited number of consumers at once once it is set up because there are no active agents needed to handle queries. The technology should be able to handle more conversational language, according to the business, and 100% of frequently asked questions are addressed.
Despite having an unlimited capacity to assist consumers, cost is determined by the quantity of interactions, which are displayed in several tiers. In any case, running a Chatbot should be less expensive than paying many operators, allowing businesses to expand without significantly increasing their expenses.
How a chatbot functions
Before you start implementing Chatbot for your company, there must be some setup. This mostly concentrates on creating a network of potential paths that customers could take, lining up a variety of appropriate responses, and redirects.
There are many chances to incorporate data and media to assist the dialogue, and the approach somewhat resembles a family tree or a flow chart.
It’s crucial to set up fallbacks for more difficult queries that a chatbot cannot answer. When appropriate, these could also include Livechat connections, support ticket creation, and links to help pages.