We’ve talked about live chat in the past, but did you know that 41% of customers expect you to have live chat available on your website? Check out the recent blog post from 3CX, talking about live chat solutions, and what to look for in a live chat app.

If you run a business and want to ensure customer satisfaction, live chat is a must have for customer support and interaction.

According to data from SuperOffice:

• 41 percent of customers expect you to have live chat support on your website.
• For mobile users, this number goes up to 50 percent.
• Customer satisfaction is much higher with live chat than with other means of communication: there’s an average customer satisfaction rating of 82 percent for live chat compared to 61 percent for email and 44 percent for phone.
• Unsurprisingly, 79 percent of businesses reported an increase in sales, revenue, and customer loyalty due to implementing live chat.

That said, as promising as having live chat is, your live chat app can make or break the chat experience. This is why your live chat app absolutely must have the following features:

1. Chat notifications that automatically inform you (by audio, browser popup, email, etc.) anytime there is a new chat message – this is especially important when your agents are dealing with multiple chat requests all at once.
2. An option to forward chat transcripts to users’ emails – or better yet, allowing users to automatically have their chat transcripts forwarded to their email.
3. An option to create canned responses that can be used to respond to common chat questions.
4. A feature that allows customers to leave feedback and rate their chat experience.
5. A mobile app that allows you to keep tabs on chat requests without having to be glued to your computer.
6. Integrations with your CRM and analytics that allow you to map the customer journey and monitor how chat is influencing your conversations.
7. An ability to ban certain users (based on IP, names, etc.) to prevent trolls from hijacking your chats.
8. In-depth chat analytics that make it possible to review key chat metrics (such as individual agent performance, collective chat performance, and average response times to chat requests for example).
9. An option to have live chat escalate to a call or video – this is because some issues are resolved better and faster via call/video as opposed to via chat.

More importantly, it should be very easy to integrate a live chat app with your website or CMS. The 3CX live chat plugin, for example, is free and can be integrated with WordPress and custom built CMSs in a matter of minutes.

https://www.3cx.com/blog/unified-communications/live-chat-app-features/