How Live Chat Addresses Small Business Customer Service Challenges

While small businesses typically understand the power of excellent customer service, it's often put on the backburner. This is natural because a small business has a limited number of resources, and the ones they have are devoted to keeping revenue coming into the business. When you're focused on making payroll, it's easy to lose sight of customer service.

For a small business, this is a “catch 22” as customer service is a business growth essential. 

Fortunately, live chat can help. Any slight edge you can gain that can multiply your efforts and allow you to level up without expending a ton of hours is important. With live chat, you can build your customer service without taking your eye off the cash producing activity you need to focus on.

4 Ways Live Chat Solves Small Business Customer Service Challenges

So how can live chat empower your small business to offer top class customer service? Here are 3 effective ways:

1. Empowers you to be available 24/7

One of the biggest customer service challenges small business face is the lack of human resources to be available for their customers. With a live chat and answering service for small business, however, you can easily serve your customers around the clock — expanding your growth potential.

How does that work?

Services like Smith.ai live chat offer you virtual receptionists to handle your customers 24/7, backed by sophisticated technology that allows them to respond to chats quickly and accurately, even while answering questions specific to your business. For example, dealerships can use our car dealer live chat on their website where potential customers can get answers to questions about any specific car at any time of the day. 

Being available for your customers helps to build trust and, as you know, trust is gold in business.

2. Helps you respond quickly

Responsiveness is one of the biggest factors that contribute to high customer satisfaction rates. That’s because we are living in a fast-paced world where everyone expects results instantly. Any delay in addressing your customers’ concerns could result in them ditching your company for another one.

In order to keep your customers happy 24/7 (and retain them), use live chat to offer customer service in real-time.

3. Identifying trends

Another great benefit you get from using live chat to overcome customer support challenges as a small business is that it helps you identify trends — both positive and negative. 

Live chat is not just a chatting tool. It’s also a great way to gain insight into your customers’ needs and also their common grievances. By identifying what they need, you gain insight into rising trends in your industry. This allows you to better position yourself to meet those needs.

On the other hand, keeping track of common customer grievances helps you discover weak points in your product or business model. Identifying these weak points is crucial to helping you improve both your product and service delivery.

4.  Get personal with customers

Personalization is one of the most important things customers look for when interacting with brands. Customers want to be treated as the individuals they are. Live chat helps you achieve this as you are able to gather data from your customer every time they interact with your brand. Not only are you able to identify them (call them by name) but you are also able to offer hyper-relevant responses based on their previous interactions with your company.  

Eliminate Small Business Customer Service Challenges with Live Chat

Just because you are a small business is no reason to offer below standard customer service. With live chat, you can easily, effortlessly, and economically eliminate most of the customer service challenges faced by small businesses.

Get started with Smith.ai Live Web Chat risk-free

It's time to try live chat on your website. Just one new client captured via chat can pay for a year (or more) of Smith.ai's live web chat service. We provide fully staffed live website chat with professional agents. Outsourced live chat is best for small businesses like law firms, e-commerce businesses, IT consultants, financial planners, property managers, realtors, and marketing agencies (to name just a few!).

Our live agents are highly skilled and can answer common questions about your business, qualify new leads, schedule appointments, take payments, and more. You stay in the loop when chat transcripts are sent to you after each conversation and logged in your CRM. There's no setup fee, services are month-to-month, and there's no annual contract. Plans start at just just $140/month and are risk-free with our 14-day money-back guarantee.