In-app Chat Support: How to Use Chat Apps to Improve Customer Support

Customer support is a key part of the customer journey and has a huge impact on how people perceive your brand. In this post we explore how in-app chat support can help you deliver a superior customer support experience.

Why does the customer support experience matter so much? Because 54% of customers will share a bad experience with more than five people – but only 33% share their positive brand experiences (according to research from Zendesk).  And with the digital economy as competitive as it is, no business can afford to provide anything but the best customer support.

With that in mind, here’s how you can take your customer experience (CX) to the next level with in-app chat support:

Businesses that adopt an omnichannel customer support strategy achieve 91% higher retention rates compared to businesses that don’t, according to research.

This makes sense since your customer base is made up of different people with different habits.  For example, your baby-boomer customers may prefer calling, but your millennial customers’ channel of choice is far more likely to be chat apps.

When it comes to customer support, instant communication is key – and chat is instant. Customers want their problems to be resolved efficiently, with 60% of customers expecting a response in 10 minutes or less.

There are added benefits to adopting in-app chat support. When banking giant RBA introduced chat support in Russia, they saw their cost-per-contact drop 10x, while their net promoter score (NPS) grew 19%. This shows how much convenient and instant customer support can benefit your business.

When building efficient omnichannel customer support, it’s important to sync and archive any cross-platform communication with customers. The customer knowledge base that you build through customer support conversations should be saved in one place so that you can use these to create conversational, personalized support across all channels.

Using the examples of chat apps and voice, let’s see how this can play out in real-time using conversational messaging.

Say your customer bought a smartphone, and they can’t wait to start using it. Here’s what the delivery notification would look like using a chat app:

Your customer can click the ‘YES’ button to choose a convenient delivery time, and change the delivery details using the chat app.

If the item arrives damaged, your customer can easily contact customer service via a ‘click-to-call’ button, after which they’ll be directed to the correct person through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) flow.

This is a very simple example, but the possibilities for personalization are endless. With relevant and timely messaging, as well as a chat-based omnichannel approach, customers will feel constantly supported throughout their entire relationship with your company.

Did you know? Infobip can support all the major chat apps that are used regionally or globally (from WhatsApp Business and Viber to VKontakte, Line, and KakaoTalk).

Customer support needs to transition seamlessly from bot support to human communication. Use the right tool and set up the right triggers to bring in a human agent for advanced resolution.

People want their questions answered as quickly as possible, without much effort. Make sure that automated messages are set up for FAQs. It helps to have a customer knowledge base available to agents for personalized support.

Ensure your support is available on multiple channels: chat apps, email, voice, and in-app chat support.

Make sure your customer support solution enables easy communication with customers over all channels, from a single interface. This makes personalized communication easy to manage for your team. It also gives customers different channels for different solutions, but with the same outcome: a seamless customer experience.

Be sure to test and iterate your in-app chat support to continually improve the customer experience you provide. Remember that customer support is just one way chat apps can assist your customers and the business. For more ideas on how to create seamless interactions between your business and customers using mobile, be sure to download our “Ultimate Guide on Messaging.”