Live Chat Support Or Phone Support In 2021? How About Both?

November 19, 2020

Why live chat needs to be the priority over the phone support for your online store in 2021.

Huh, seriously, it's almost 2021, and you want me to text customers for support rather than just giving a quick call? Well, it's a little more complicated than that.

Support Forums & FAQ as the first choice

You shouldn't be giving similar level of support to all customers. Why ? Cause it's not practical. Customer queries that are too frequently asked just write them in FAQ's. Create a forum page and encourage more customer's to ask questions publicly so that other customers have similar problems they can find the solution on the same place. It's important to understant both live chat support and phone support are hard to scale compared to support forums.

Live Chat Support

In case the complaints of the customer are too specific or relatively urgent live chat support should be chosen. But wouldn't the customer just want to make a quick call? yes, but the problem is that customers can feel like making a call for any query, and but it isn't possible for the store owner to handle multiple phone calls at once. Live chat widget allow store owners to switching between multiple queries lot faster. Whereas in phone support to switch from one customer to another in the middle of the conversation can be frustrating, aka " can you hold the call for a few minutes please".

You also don't have to worry about accent differences. You can outsource your live chat support to any region where people can read and write English without fearing if they can understand the way you speak.

Phone Support

For most, the urgent pain points nothing better than a quick call to customer support helps. If the arisen issue is so critical that it's disrupting business operations phone support should be provided. Store owners need to realize that for customer's every single issue of them might feel like making a call. Store owners need to learn where to draw the line on what type of support needs to be provided. Only the highly urgent issues need to be supported via the least scalable solutions.