Part 2: Taking “On-hold” Out of B2B Customer Support

In Part 1 of this blog series we started exploring tools that can help your B2B customers solve issues on their own and ways to help them feel more comfortable doing so.

Now in Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore one way that customers can speed up the time to ticket resolution with live chat.

Let’s Chat!

It’s no secret that more B2B customers are using live chat than ever before. A simple way to get a response from a business without having to call (and often face hold times) or email—like we discussed in Part 1—live chat for customer service is a real-time form of communication many businesses leverage daily. And today, live chat is no longer optional in customer service because it has evolved into more than just a chat conversation; it’s now the tip of the spear in customer conversations. This option saves both customers and agents time as well as creates better customer experiences through improved answers and information, particularly when the chat function can incorporate images, video, and links to self-help resources.

Chat can be a really effective tool for getting immediate help for simple and even complex issues. But if not used correctly on both sides of the conversation, it can be cause stress and have the opposite effect of what we’re trying to achieve.

To Bot or Not to Bot? That is the Question

First we have to ask ourselves whether to use an automated chat bot. The argument can be made that if you have the right B2B customer support software solution, the chat bot is not a good idea. For one, some customers may look to speak to a real person and be annoyed when they find out that they have started a session with a chat bot. For another, most bots sit independent of a support solution, meaning data can’t be shared between the bot and the software. If an agent has to intervene, there can be a time delay in sifting through the canned responses to figure out the actual issue. Many times, the customer has given up by then.

B2B customers are more complex and higher value than B2C customers. And their issues tend to be more complex, too. While machine learning has come a long way towards decent accuracy rates—about 80%—it won’t match a live agent providing chat support. With a B2B customer support software solution like TeamSupport, live chats and missed chats will automatically create tickets in the system, so if the customer switches channels to phone or email, support agents still have full visibility into the chat conversation and no information is lost, even if a different agent takes over!

Learn more about how TeamSupport’s live chat function can help speed time to ticket resolution in this TeamSupport University segment. Watch on demand.

And look forward to the conclusion of this series on speeding time to ticket resolution where we’ll explore visual support tools.