6 Ways Chat Will Keep Your Customers Happily Engaged This Holiday Season

The holidays are upon us, and now more than ever customers want digital self-serve experiences  that cater to their needs while doing their special holiday shopping. Forward-thinking, digital-first brands are winning the customer battle through personalization and immediacy, made simple and effective through chat commerce.

But what is chat commerce? And how does it give you the power to engage  with your customers like never before?

Simply put, chat commerce is a form of digital commerce that gives your customers the direct access they need to your business and brand on the chat platforms and channels they’ve grown to love. Through the likes of WhatsApp (with over 2 billion users who check in more than 23 times each day), Facebook Messenger, and SMS, chat commerce allows customers to search for and learn more about your products and services, resolve queries and disputes, make purchases, and track or return their orders.

Chat channels are easy to integrate into your business. Most importantly, these platforms are where you’ll find the majority of your customers going about their lives, chatting with colleagues, and making holiday plans with friends and loved ones. Chat is being utilized through every step of the customer lifecycle – before, during, and after a purchase is made. According to Forrester, “Customer service is the most common use for chat amongst retailers and brands – both pre- and post-purchase.”

Fulfill your customers’ aspirations of saving time and money with your brand and satisfy them with outstanding customer service in chat this festive season.

Deliver These Six Great Customer Experiences in Chat

1) Give instant customer care and service

Directly connect with your customers in chat so they can track orders, view current catalogs, access a digital store card, locate nearby stores, and have frequently asked questions (FAQs) instantly answered. Customers can connect with a brand directly on a chat app by scanning a QR code, by following a link, or by adding the brand to their address book.

2)Deflect call center volumes

Avoid costly, traditional voice channels and dreaded hold times by integrating chat channels instead. Enable agents to resolve multiple chat requests simultaneously, lowering the cost per resolution and increasing customer satisfaction.

Chat Desk is Clickatell’s digital contact center solution. It is an end-to-end chat product that enables live agents to communicate with customers over popular chat platforms, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, in real-time. Using Chat Desk, customer service agents can engage in multiple conversations simultaneously, reducing the delay in response to queries. In addition, Chat Desk offers advanced reporting and analytic tools, enabling enterprises to monitor agents’ productivity and performance metrics, as well as monitoring customer satisfaction.

 3)Recognize your customer

Customers want the same experience visiting your website  as they do in-store. When they connect with a business in a chat channel, they have an opportunity to be recognized during their interactions with the business. Utilize chat solutions for SMS messaging and your customer’s favorite chat app in the contact center to quickly demonstrate a customer-first approach.

 4)Personalize the shopping experience

The contact center offers an important opportunity to serve your customers as individuals. Chat solutions deliver personalization during every interaction, allowing businesses to communicate with each individual and deliver a personal experience during every interaction and real-time engagement. Personalized chats help businesses create differentiation in their customer support experience.

5)Respond to customers 24/7

Today’s customers want things on their own terms and in their own time and the businesses that deliver both will thrive in the coming decade. Chat solutions offer the ideal answer for customer support because they enable interactions 24/7. Customers don’t have to sacrifice time during their work hours to resolve return issues – they can reach your contact center and initiate a chat communication that can be continued and resolved in minutes, hours, or days. With chat, there is no time limit, no time-outs and, of course, no dropped calls or long-wait times to speak to a live agent.

Clickatell’s Chat Flow, drag-and-drop conversation workflow builder, enables enterprises to visually create, edit, and manage communication and business process workflows across multiple channels with little to no code required. Workflow automation and AI chatbots are pre-integrated with WhatsApp, so there is no need for additional development. For example, a drag and drop interface builds self-service workflows to power a chatbot. What’s more, you can automate a wide range of business responses to FAQs supporting customer service, engagement, and transactional use cases.

6)Let them make purchases effortlessly

Brands can improve their customer service with payments in chat. Clickatell’s Chat 2 Pay provides a more convenient and secure way to make and accept payments in chat messaging by sending customers a payment link via SMS or WhatsApp. In its design of Chat 2 Pay, Clickatell has orchestrated the complex relationship between messaging, payments, and the order management system (OMS) of their customers, and in the process mitigates the risk of merchants managing payment card details. And Chat 2 Pay is easy to implement - all merchants need to do is simply switch it on and manage.

Chat commerce gives you a powerful advantage over your competitors. It’s benefits are felt all round – from increasing support for customers to personalized user experiences and a reduction of the overall cost of doing business. Knowing all this, isn’t it time you gave your business the gift of Chat this season?

Let’s help get you started on your journey today. Contact us for more information now.