If you are running a business that provides a product or a service to your customers then you’ll know just how important customer care is. If you have been wondering what the best option for dealing with customer enquiries is, there are a couple of different options.

Many websites these days are offering some form of live chat to give customers an instant response and to help keep call congestion to a minimum. Other companies prefer to keep things on a telephone basis though, believing the personal touch to be better.

We’re going to go through both of these options and give some of the common pros and cons for each. If you are looking for a customer care solution, this may help you out.

The benefits of live chat

When looking at the advantages of live chat, it’s hard to understate just how valuable an instant response can be. Live chats are great for customers who only have a few minutes to ask a question, or possibly can’t even use a phone due to their surroundings.

A live chat function also gives you a lot more flexibility in what the customer can provide. They are able to copy and paste text, upload documents or screenshots to explain their problem – things that just aren’t possible on the phone. Customers can also leave a quick review after the chat concludes and you can keep a database of chat transcripts from your sessions. This can help you pinpoint training areas based on these reviews.

Some people just hate using the telephone. Whether or not this is down to social anxiety or a sheer dislike, if there isn’t an option to open a live chat on your website, they could potentially move elsewhere.

Is it better to provide customer support lines?

On the other hand, some customers will always want to speak to a real person. Emotion is something that is hard to convey over short text messages and giving your customers the option to speak to a human is a great personal touch.

This is also helpful for an audience that isn’t comfortable with or able to access the tech needed for live chat. In these circumstances it could be a lot easier to explain a problem over the phone rather than feel anxious about how to type it all out.

One of the negative sides of using a customer call line is that you may soon be overloaded with calls. If a customer has to wait a while to reach a representative or cannot get through at all, this will make any complaint they have worse. Call centres with loud, distorted hold music and hour-long waiting queues can be the death of a business’s reputation.

With both of these solutions, it’s important to make them as easy as possible to use. Having a live chat that requires the user to go through four different options to find the representative they need is almost as bad as having somebody on hold for an hour.

Accessible customer support

It goes without saying that these services should be easy to understand. Providing customer care that is accessible and easy to use is worth investing in. This will let you reach all of your customers as well as showing a degree of awareness.