8 Reasons You Should Add Webchat to Your Contact Center Today

While voice has been the channel traditionally associated with call centers for years, many modern contact centers have now evolved to include webchat capabilities.

What is Webchat?

Webchat is a digital channel through which people can communicate with organizations in a text-based format. An organization’s webchat is typically accessed through a chat window on their website.

Webchat provides an alternative to voice, email, or other channels. Like voice, webchat offers the advantage of real-time communication without the delays often associated with emails. However, the digital nature provides the advantages of flexibility and convenience. It allows chatters to easily see a written record of their entire conversation history; provides an alternative channel for people who prefer to avoid verbal communication by phone; offers a number of beneficial features not available with other channels; and more.

Webchat Features

Webchat offers many of the same standard contact center features that are available for voice interactions. These include supervisor functions like coaching, barge-in, and silent monitor; custom routing options, such as skills-based routing; and interaction handling options for agents like conference, consult, and transfer.

However, webchat also offers many features that provide advantages over other communication channels, such as:

• Canned Responses – Webchat allows users to configure a library of canned responses, or pre-written responses they can send with a simple click. These are especially helpful to use for common greetings and answers to frequently asked questions, as they save agents time from having to type the same information repeatedly.
• Multi-Contact Handling – With webchat, contact center administrators have the option to enable multi-contact handling for agents. Multi-contact handling allows agents to handle multiple digital interactions simultaneously or handle digital interactions while also on a voice call. With this feature, agents can message one chatter while waiting for a response from another, thus maximizing their productivity.
• Option to Add a Chatbot – Webchat provides the option to add a chatbot. Chatbots can serve as a first point of contact for chatters reaching out to an organization, providing options for self-service and/or directing them to the best suited agent for their inquiry if applicable.
• File Sharing – Webchat allows both agents and chatters to attach files to their messages. This enhances communication and provides convenience by allowing users to send files rather than typing out the same information from the file or trying to describe the file in words.
• Brand Customization Options – Chat windows may be customized to match an organization’s branding through the configuration of color scheme, logo inclusion, and more.
• Transcripts – Chat transcripts are often saved by default, providing easy access to written records of the webchat exchange.

Why You Should Add Webchat to Your Contact Center

The flexibility to choose between preferred contact methods is a considerable convenience to customers. But the advantages of webchat extend far beyond just convenience for customers. Read on to see some of the benefits that webchat can provide:

1. Increase Productivity

   Webchat allows multi-contact handling to be enabled for agents. With multi-contact handling, agents can respond to a message from one chatter while waiting for a response from another chatter. This allows them to serve more customers in the same amount of time, increasing overall productivity and efficiency.

2. Resolve Inquiries Faster

   With the option to use canned responses, webchat helps resolve common inquiries faster by allowing agents to instantly send pre-written responses. Canned responses ensure that agents don’t have to waste their time re-typing the same information over and over while also ensuring that customers don’t have to wait a long time for responses.

3. Reduce Costs

   There are multiple ways that webchat can help organizations reduce costs. By offloading some inquiries from voice to chat, organizations can often decrease phone line capacity, allowing them to save on telephony costs. Additionally, they can reduce staffing costs by enabling agents to handle multiple interactions simultaneously and/or by offloading common questions or routine tasks to chatbots.

4. Improve Response Rate from Prospects

   One study found that the odds of contacting a lead decreased by 10x after 5 minutes without a response from the organization. Rather than having leads fill out a form on your website, allow them to start the conversation immediately with live chat.

5. Extend Service Hours with Self-Serve Chatbots

   The inability to reach your organization during your off hours can decrease customers’ satisfaction levels and cause them to switch to a competitive offering.  You can avoid this problem by using a chatbot to provide customers with 24/7 service. Chatbots can provide answers to common questions and perform routine tasks. This enables you to provide services outside of your standard hours and improve your customer experience.

6. Decrease Wait Times

   Long voice queues can cause your customers frustration before they even get to speak to you. Webchat enables agents to handle multiple customer interactions at once, unlike voice calls. While a customer is responding to an agent, that agent can handle another interaction. Depending on the proficiency of the agent, the number of web chats they can handle at once can be adjusted.

7. Instantly Qualify Leads

   It can be a struggle to qualify leads that come in through your web forms. Generic forms lack the necessary questions to properly qualify a lead and too many questions often cause leads to not fill out the form. By using webchat instead, you can ask prospects questions in real time about their needs, pain points, and what they are looking for. This allows you to qualify the lead without a generic form.

8. Improve Customer Experience and Increase Loyalty

   In addition to providing convenience and flexibility to customers by simply providing an alternative to a voice call, webchat can help improve customer experiences through its various features. Multi-contact handling decreases wait times; the option to add a chatbot can extend hours of service; canned responses contribute to prompt issue resolution. Together, all these benefits contribute to an overall improvement in customer experience and an increase in customer loyalty.

Transforming Your Operations with Webchat

Evidently, the benefits of adding webchat to your contact center extend far beyond customer convenience.  If you would like to learn more about the features and benefits of webchat, click here or request a demo.