How has your experience with chat support been?
Hey, guys!
We've been providing chat support almost since day one. It felt great at the beginning once we were seeing it as a way to keep close to our customers (isn't it what everyone says we should do?) but, at the moment, it's just a huge overhead.
On our use case, I have the impression that most of the messages we've received from visitors didn't provide any useful feedback 👎. It seems to me that being constantly interrupted and having to reply within seconds aren't worth the potential benefits, especially for a team of two.
Now I'm curious:
- How has your experience with chat support been?
- As a user, do you reply to those automatic messages when you visit a website?
- Do you think that email support provides a bad experience to customers?
Our general experience (and something I've personally heard from other founders and support teams) is that you basically have 3 levels of support to offer...
Any of those is fine, as long as you're clear what the general response times will be and email is totally fine.
The problem comes in when you have live chat on your site, or a "messaging" tool like Intercom, but then don't make clear that you won't be responding immediately.
There's generally no direct correlation to "instant response" and customer retention. There is correlation to saying you'll provide instant responses and then take a 24 hours to respond.
Just pick one and be clear to your customers what it is you'll be offering.