How Live Chat Helps Businesses Identify and Address Customer Needs

Delivering excellent client support is about solving problems. However, a big component of solving problems has nothing to do with what you say or do. The first step in client service is understanding what your clients need. 

To truly offer great support, you need to pull out concerns and diagnose the issues your clients are facing. Live chat can be a great tool for understanding and listening to your clients.

How Live Chat Helps Businesses Identify and Address Customer Needs

Live chat is a software that helps you boost your online customer service by affording you the abilities to offer live support. Live chat software also comes with web analytics capabilities thus giving you in-depth insight into customer behavior.

So how does live chat help you identify and address customer needs?

3 Ways Live Chat Help You Identify and Address Customer Needs

Live chat is a powerful way of connecting to your audience and giving them the support they need to make the best of your products/services. Here’s how you can also use it to identify and address customer needs:

1. Build relationships with customers

One of the most powerful features of live chat is the way it works in real-time. This makes your customers easily feel like they are chatting to a friend. It becomes easier to ask your customers what they expect from you and what they don’t like about your product. Thanks to the relationship you have built, your customer will gladly open up to you.

A live chat conversation can easily yield more information than a survey. That’s especially if you use trained professional live chat agents. With the feedback you get from your conversations, you can easily tweak your product, service, or delivery model to satisfy your customers’ needs.

For example, if a client prefers a payment channel that you’re not using, that would be a good time to include it as that customer represents only one of many who prefer it.

2. Walk your customers through your process

Another great way in which live chat can help you identify customer needs is in the way it enables you to walk your customers through the buyer journey. 

How does this help?

Easy. As you walk your customer through the buyer journey you get to identify those parts that are not so easy to navigate. This could be where many of them “drop off” due to frustration.

Identify these friction points and redesign your buyer journey to be as smooth as possible.

3. Use data to find gaps

 Live chat software comes with an analytics dashboard. You can leverage this data to identify what your customers need. For example, the most commonly asked questions are an indicator of the needs your customers have in a particular area of your business.

The data you collect through your interactions with your customers can provide you with a wealth of knowledge concerning your customers’ pain points. Leveraging that data will enable you to address those needs efficiently thus helping you retain more customers.  

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.