WebsiteAlive Editor Christin Gulick contributed to this article.

Many companies have begun to realize the benefits of Live Chat. It can be used to answer pre-sales questions, sales questions, or act as a virtual help desk. Additionally, it significantly decreases the number of customer support professionals a company needs to staff its help desk with. One customer support representative can assist multiple customers at once with a Live Chat system.

Live Chat systems have some disadvantages, but they can be easily remedied. For example, many Live Chat systems force the customer service representative to respond to a customer question with a canned, template response. Although this does provide consistency with what representatives tell customers, too often a canned response seems too canned, there may not even be a response that fits the customer’s question exactly. In these scenarios, a customer can become frustrated easily and may even become hostile; no customer likes speaking to a machine and they shouldn’t have to. Make sure representatives can, if needed, respond independently from the template responses to a customer. Additionally, the canned responses should match the tone and structure of the actual customer service reps – a customer shouldn’t be able to tell when they’ve received a canned response or an independent one.

Additionally, customers shouldn’t be forced to wait or repeat themselves when engaged in a Live Chat. Most Live Chat systems require the customer to enter their problem into the system before they begin a conversation. Customer service reps should read this before they begin speaking with the customer and should not ask the typical question, “How can I help you?” A customer would then presume that they need to repeat their issue within the chat system, which they shouldn’t need to do. Additionally, anyone and everyone who engages in a single live chat with a customer should have access to everything said previously in that chat. If a customer gets shuffled among three different representatives, each representative should already know what has been done so far to assist the customer and what the original issue the customer brought to the system was. Whenever there is a pause in conversation, the customer should also know that they will need to wait – there’s no white noise online, so simply pausing in a conversation won’t do. In the digital realm responses should be quick, almost instantaneous. If at any point the customer will need to wait for over ten to fifteen seconds, let the customer know.

Live Chat systems have the potential to be a great asset to a company, if implemented the right way. Poor Live Chat systems reflect poorly on a company and can cause it to even loose business as a result.