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Live chat is a tool that helps agents reach their customers quickly, answer questions, keep their chat handle time low, and swiftly move onto the next customer. Unfortunately, many businesses are unable to use it correctly as many customers are unsatisfied with their live chat experience.

According to research of four hundred customers and one hundred businesses, almost a quarter of the customers are frustrated and tired of long waiting times for chats. Thirty-eight per cent of them are annoyed because of scripted responses that businesses use to save time. Despite this, customers are still beginning to prefer companies with live chat tools over companies that do not use it.

A big barrier that reduces the average handle time is that some live chat platforms give more problems than solutions. They increase the number of things the support team has to prioritize, juggle and solve. Kayako aims to support their agents reduce their response times while giving customers proper support by introducing a variety of powerful and easy to use tools.

When your business is operating on a small scale, adding another platform of communication does not seem like it will be too much of a hassle for your support team. However, as your business expands, traditional chat services get hectic and hard to manage, especially if you are not using a well-integrated support system.

When businesses use other communication channels, like calls and emails, with a live chat tool, keeping track of their customers’ background history becomes difficult. The business’ support team is unable to keep track of their customer’s full experience, they will also face difficulty in managing their customers’ chats, this problem results in customers having to wait, which results in losing them.

There are ways in which your business’ help desk can reduce the handling time on their chats. One of the ways to do so is by keeping everything organized. Automation tools are the best option to make this possible; top priority, urgent customers can be directed to the best agent on the team to be given the best service, customers can be divided between regions they are from, prioritize some chats with the keyword ‘urgent’ and assign customers to the right support channel. Using automation will keep your team more organized and will help them reach their response-time goals.

A great way to reduce chat handle time is to simply minimize the number of chats that come your way, a lot of customers send messages like ‘where is my parcel?’ which do not need real time support to be answered effectively. Your business can direct customers to an FAQ page where common and general questions have been answered before hand. Getting rid of common queries will help you reduce your volume of chats, calls and overall, lower your team’s workload.

You can also do so by customizing your home page, adding a tool that shows your customers exactly how many of your support team members are online. This will make them cooperate and wait more patiently, instead of getting frustrated. Also, putting up your team members’ actual pictures will make your chat feel more personalized.

Choosing a live chat software according to your business’ size will help you in the long run. Kayako has everything in one place which saves time, speeds up response times and also reduces handle times. When your agents have access to their customer’s background history with your business, they are able to help them more efficiently.

Live chat has been around for a while now, however other traditional chat programs are failing to help agents solve the demands faced by the support team agents, which is why it has started to become more popular.