How to Provide 24/7 Live Chat Support with Limited Resources

Implementing a good live chat system is one of the best investments you can make for your company’s website. Read our blog post for top 10 live chat benefits you should know.

When it comes to cost-effective, user-friendly communication methods, traditional methods such as email and phone support fail miserably in comparison to live chat.

While live chat is indeed an extremely effective tool, it is not much use to your company if visitors cannot reach your support team.

Therefore, in this post, I will give you a few ideas on how you can provide 24/7 live chat support in order to serve as many site visitors as possible whenever in need.

And most importantly, you don’t have to add extra resources to achieve that.

Prime Time in Your Target Zones

Hopefully, you have a good idea of who your Web customers are and where they are located. If you don’t, use Google Analytics or another tool to uncover this information. Better still, invest in a live chat program that provides this type of visitor information for you.

While customers in your immediate vicinity may not mind visiting your office during normal business hours, consumers on the Internet don’t play by the same rules and expect service and support all the time.

Consequently, live chat works best when it’s available 24 hours a day.

Even if you cannot provide real-time support 24/7, you should still make sure that your live chat is online and available at hours convenient to customers and visitors in your primary market areas and zones.

At a minimum, have an agent or two available during prime time hours in the primary zones. A good rule of thumb is to make your live chat agents available until at least 10 or 11 PM.

Take the Desk on the Road

As I mentioned in the previous section, you should make your live chat available as much and as often as possible.

One way to do this is to use a live chat platform that offers mobile apps for agents that let them answer chat requests even when they’re out of the office.

If your support staff is a little shorthanded, assign one or two agents to handle chat requests on an “On Call” basis, and don’t forget to reward them for providing great support even after hours.

Hire Global Help

Assigning staff members to handle live chat support on an “On Call” basis is effective if you have a relatively small number of support chat requests.

If you have a high volume of chat requests, though, you may want to consider hiring some full- time help to assist with the workload.

Instead of hiring full-time employees to handle afterhours and weekend chat request, consider outsourcing to freelancer or agencies.

Freelancer and support team agencies can learn your products and services and may help to reduce costs versus hiring full-time employees.

Freelancer-sourcing sites such as UpWork.com, Freeelancer.com and Elance.com enable you to find skilled customer support and live chat agents from all over the world.

Another benefit of outsourcing or using freelancers is helps to cover times when your full-time team members are out of the office.

Using freelancers to handle live chat requests can help ensure that your site visitor have access to support 24 hours a day.

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No matter what your customer service channel is, top performing agents always receive high customer satisfaction rate. Here is a practical guide for live chat agents to communicating effectively, addressing customer issues efficiently, and representing your brand professionally.

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