It's all the rage nowadays to offer customer support via live chat, but it comes at a cost.
Live chat began as a premium support perk to get customers the help they needed, fast. It quickly swept up companies in every major industry; everyone wanted to have a chat widget on their site.
The not-so-hidden cost of 24/7 support
The problem with the growth of live chat is that it takes a lot of resources to get right; you have to staff someone to be there, pretty much 24/7, in order to actually reply to customers quickly. Someone sends a message and you stepped away to make a coffee? Chances are, they're abandoning the chat.
Some companies have tried to cope with the heavy investment required for live chat by outsourcing this channel to third party vendors, or hiring offshore teams. The problem here is usually that this separate support tier is not as capable as your in-house support, which customers are quick to pick up on. Issues often have to be escalated to internal support, or customers are just disappointed by the quality of the experience they're getting.
More often than not what I see nowadays is live chat widgets that are seemingly unstaffed. You send a message but can't reach anyone live, and are left waiting for an email response.
Chat is effective as a medium
The immediacy and flexibility of live chat make it attractive, but how do you fix the human staffing element?
Well, that's where AI comes into play. LLMs (large language models) are naturally extremely well suited to chat as a medium. When empowered with the right tools and ability to resolve common requests, they can resolve support inquiries much more efficiently for both the customer and your team via chat.
In a way, we've arrived at a solution to the live chat staffing issue via the advent of highly capable AI support agents.
The natural evolution of live chat
For most companies, small and large, staffing a support team to handle live chat just isn't tenable. At the same time, you want to offer customers a chance to resolve issues quickly, and without navigating a maze of self-service support options.
With AI, this becomes a solvable issue. By focusing a “live chat” offering on issues that can quickly be solved by an effective LLM, you obviate the need for chat staffing, and you maintain customers' access to swift support options.
In our eyes, the most effective way to implement chat as a support channel nowadays is to set up an AI agent that's capable of solving your most common array of issues, while escalating to asynchronous human support where needed. Making this distinction clear to users is even more important.
Ready to build a chatbot customers actually love? Contact us to see how Valiopt can help.