Report: Live Chat Tops Customer Engagement Channels

Live Chat becoming preferred for customersEvery marketer wants to engage customers the best way possible. Well, customers who choose live chat for customer service are satisfied a higher percentage of the time than those who call, email, or use social media channels, according the latest quarterly Zendesk Benchmark report.

“Customers are gravitating more toward live chat as their preferred channel,” said Jason Maynard, senior manager of data and analytics at Zendesk. “Organizations who use live chat move customer requests away from web forms and feedback tabs to real-time chat, where questions can be answered directly in the web or mobile experience.”

Customers appear to enjoy a more back-and-forth style of conversation, the report says

“Specifically, live chat customer satisfaction increases as the number of chat messages exchanged increases,” the report says. “One possible reason: Customers are happier with agents who are more engaged in the customer support process—either by asking more troubleshooting questions, or simply taking the time to ask the customer how his or her day is going.”

According to the report, after live chat (92%), the channels that provide the most customer satisfaction are: Voice (88%), Web Form (85%), Email (85%), Facebook (84%), and Twitter (77%).Live Chat allows consumers' questions to be answered in real time

Here are some other key findings from the report:

The most popular time to live chat an agent? Between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. local time. More than 50% of chats occurred at this time.

With live chat, organizations who receive tickets via their website have fewer requests submitted through their web forms after adding live chat, showing that many customers prefer to talk in real time when they are using the company website.

The number of messages exchanged alone doesn’t just impact customer satisfaction, the time to first reply and the size of a customer service agent’s chat workload are also important factors. Although agents can manage multiple conversations at once, they do hit a limit on how many chats they can handle before it hurts customer satisfaction.

Agents using live chat in Mexico have the most chat conversations—managing the highest volume of chats.

Agents in Denmark keep things fast and simple—they deliver the swiftest reply times and are the most concise.

The average benchmark for live chat across all geographies and industries is 62 chat conversations per month; first response time of 1 minute 36 seconds on average; and customer satisfaction of 92%.

The report was based on data from 2,261 Zendesk customers who completed the Zendesk Benchmark survey and are using Zopim Live Chat to provide real-time customer service. To be included, companies must have conducted at least 25 chats in Q1 2015. For findings relating to live chat customer satisfaction, companies must have received at least 25 satisfaction ratings in Q1 2015.

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