Did you know that over 50% of consumers are more likely to stay loyal to a company that offers live chat support?
It’s no surprise that businesses across industries are now shifting their focus from old-school email support to live chat as the go-to customer service channel. To stay competitive, you need to meet customer expectations, and having a live chat feature on your website is a smart investment.
If you plan to shift from email to live chat as your primary support channel, you probably have questions.
How do you ensure a smooth transition for your team? Chat support requires quick, concise communication — a different skill set from email support.
How do you encourage customers, who are used to emailing, to start using chat instead?
In this article, we’ll go over the benefits of switching from email to live chat, along with practical tips to help you make this transition smoothly.
Benefits of live chat
Here’s why live chat is becoming a favorite among customers and companies worldwide.
Quick replies = higher customer satisfaction
Customers no longer have the patience for slow responses. They won't hesitate to seek alternatives if their inquiries are not promptly addressed by your email support team.
While email support is still common, with questions going unanswered for hours or days, it doesn’t align with the growing demand for immediacy. In contrast, live chat inquiries are typically resolved within minutes, offering quicker resolutions and a better customer experience.
Streamlined information gathering and better ticket management*
With email, you often have to go back and forth to gather all the necessary details. Live chat, on the other hand, allows you to automate data collection right from the start.
You can set up a bot flow and guide customers through your data collection process to gather important information upfront — including their contact details, browser version, or the urgency of their issue. This allows you to automatically assign tickets to the right agent or team and handle requests more efficiently.
If you do ask customers to indicate the urgency and theme of their request to triage tickets based on it, be aware that customers often exaggerate the urgency of their issue to get a faster response.
Automation and self-service empowerment
69% of customers prefer quick answers via self-service channels rather than reaching out to your support team. And 100% of agents would rather have simpler one-touch questions automated so they can focus on more engaging and challenging queries.
By incorporating chatbots, you can handle routine tasks — like checking order statuses, processing refunds, or answering common questions — without human intervention. This reduces support volume, boosts team morale, and enhances the customer experience.
6 best practices to roll out live chat like a pro
Live chat is a powerful tool for improving customer support, but to roll it out successfully, you need a thoughtful approach. In this section, we’ll dive into the best practices for transitioning from email to live chat to enhance both team efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Get it right the first time, and you’ll avoid headaches down the road.
Make sure your customers know you have live chat support
People won’t start reaching out to you via live chat instead of email overnight. This means that suddenly cutting off email support you’ve been offering for years will lead to upset customers who are used to it. You’ll need to help them transition with a behavior change campaign:
Start by introducing live chat by adding a new email signature to all emails sent by your team, encouraging customers to try chat.
Highlight the live chat option as the main call to action on your Contact Us page, so new customers naturally go with the chat option when they need help.
Include a link to open a new live chat in your automatic email replies. For example, in your ticket acknowledgment email, you might add something like: “For immediate help, please consider using our online chat.”
Additionally, you can promote live chat in order confirmation emails or even newsletters. Here’s an example of how a popular ecommerce brand Alo Yoga uses email to highlight their chat support in the order confirmation email.
Bit by bit, customers will begin gravitating toward live chat as their preferred support channel.
Prioritize chat response times and set clear expectations for different channels
Customers expect near-instant responses on live chat, typically within a minute. On the other hand, they tend to be more patient with email, where waiting up to 12 hours for a reply is generally acceptable.
To meet these different expectations, it’s a good idea to adjust your service level objectives and KPIs. Prioritize live chat queries over emails so your team can provide quicker resolutions where it counts most.
You can even include a friendly note in your email replies, letting customers know that most issues can be resolved in minutes via live chat, while email inquiries typically take longer. By offering faster solutions through chat and guiding customers toward it, you'll naturally encourage more people to use this channel.
A great way to communicate expected response times and nudge customers toward live chat is by stating it directly on your contact-us page. Take Therabody as an example—they clearly highlight that email responses may take up to three days, while live chat offers immediate assistance.
This simple step can make a big difference in shaping customer behavior.
Optimize your team’s schedule
When it comes to email support, customers are usually satisfied with a response within one business day. This means your team doesn’t have to worry too much about peak hours—instead, you can simply staff based on the total daily or weekly volume.
For example, if you receive about 150 emails every day and each agent can handle around 50 tickets, you’d need about three agents to cover the workload.
Chat support is a different story.
Since live chat requires much quicker response times, you’ll need more coverage during peak hours, especially if most of your chats come in during a 4-5 hour window. For businesses that operate 24/7 or serve customers across multiple time zones, it’s crucial to spread out available resources while still ensuring coverage during the busiest times.
So how do you tackle this?
Start by analyzing your peak support periods. Identify the busiest hours of each day and the busiest days of the week to determine where you need the most coverage and where a single agent might be sufficient.
Platforms like Zendesk allow you to track ticket volume by the hour with custom reports, while Intercom gives you insights into peak hours right out of the box. Help Scout also offers a built-in report on your busiest times.
For more detailed planning, you can use tools like an Erlang calculator. And if you’re managing a smaller team, a simple spreadsheet with staffing formulas can work just as well.
Set up bot flows or configure AI to handle common queries
If you don’t have the resources to staff your live chat 24/7, the good news is—it doesn’t always have to be live. You can offer round-the-clock chat support by using conversational AI or rule-based chatbots to deflect common questions, streamline access to self-serve resources, and resolve issues even when your agents aren’t around.
Start by identifying low-effort, high-volume tasks that can easily be automated. For example, why have agents handle simple return or cancellation requests when a bot can do it faster?
With automation, the bot can retrieve an order number, check order details, verify the request, and process it if valid. This not only saves your team a ton of time but also enhances the customer experience by removing unnecessary friction for simple requests.
With a well-performing bot, your customers will be pleasantly surprised by how quickly and efficiently their issue is handled, which can encourage them to use chat more often in the future.
That said, make sure it’s easy to reach a human when the issue is more complex and the bot isn’t able to help. This is just a best practice today but it’s going to become a legal requirement with the EU mandating “the right to talk to a human” in customer service interactions by 2028.
If a request needs to be routed to a human agent outside of office hours, ensure the bot clearly communicates the expected response time and follows up via email. This way, customers aren’t left waiting on an open chat page for a reply.
Keep your knowledge base up-to-date
A well-maintained knowledge base is one of the best tools to help your team handle chat queries effectively.
When common questions and scenarios are covered in your customer-facing help center, it empowers customers to self-serve by searching for answers or engaging with a conversational AI bot that pulls information directly from your knowledge base.
On the other hand, having well-documented processes and edge cases in your team's internal knowledge base allows agents to quickly access the information they need to resolve customer questions efficiently.
A good idea to keep your knowledge base current is to ensure that for every ticket answered, there’s a resource available — whether it's for customers or internal use. You can require agents to link the relevant resource to each ticket or take a more flexible approach, encouraging agents to document new insights based on the tickets they handle.
When you’ve automated the simple queries and every ticket requires more in-depth digging, I promise there will be something to document for most interactions.
Tools like Guru make it easy for agents to add new knowledge quickly, with subject matter experts reviewing and approving the content to ensure accuracy.
Taking this knowledge-centered approach and involving your entire team in maintaining the documentation can be a game-changer for helping you address live chat tickets swiftly and consistently.
Auto-merge tickets for a smoother workflow
When you introduce live chat, it's common for customers to reach out across multiple channels, especially if their issue is urgent or they're feeling frustrated. You’ll likely see customers opening a chat, then reaching out via email, opening another chat, and then sending another email, and so on. Merging all those repeat requests is crucial for efficient workflow and reliable ticket data.
Most help desks offer the ability to merge tickets, and for those that don’t, you can use workarounds like closing tickets and applying tags to identify duplicates in reports.
While agents can manually search for and merge tickets from each customer, live chat requires quick responses, and cutting down on manual tasks can make a big difference.
With tools like Swifteq, you can automatically merge duplicate Zendesk tickets and Freshdesk tickets received through different channels—saving your team time and allowing them to focus on resolving new inquiries efficiently with a more streamlined workflow.
Deliver excellent chat support with Swifteq
Delivering top-notch chat support doesn’t have to be complicated. With Swifteq’s automation apps, you can effortlessly merge tickets, translate messages, and handle other routine tasks—allowing your team to focus on what truly matters: providing exceptional customer service.
Ready to take your customer support to the next level? Book a free demo today to discover how Swifteq can streamline your operations and help you deliver outstanding chat support.
Written by Maryna Paryvai Maryna is a results-driven CX executive passionate about efficient and human-centric customer support. She firmly believes that exceptional customer experiences lie at the heart of every successful business. |