Benefits of Customer Support Widgets
What is a support widget?
Support widgets are simple, easy-to-use software applications intended for one or more platforms. This makes them an effective way to stay in touch with your customers, by placing a widget on your website. In addition to making your website easier and more engaging to use, widgets can also help visitors discover new sections of your site.
Why is a customer support widget important for business success?
Organizations today are more competitive than ever. Earlier, customers made decisions based on prices, products, or locations. Today customers are focused on their experience with the brand or organization, more than ever.
In this context, providing effective customer care can help increase customer retention. Customer experience is a journey that involves all customer interaction with your brand or organization. Customer trust begins with the initial interaction and actually never really ends.
You may have an idea of what your product represents. But how will you convey the same to your customers? They can’t get into your head.
Their perceptions and expectations are shaped by what they see on your social media channels, advertisements, website content, and other marketing materials they come across, both online and offline.
This phenomenon also extends to the customer support widget as it too is an extension of your brand. Your customer service team represents your brand when they interact with potential customers through your support widget. They help convey your strengths over your competitors through the support widget.
These widgets are usually present in a pop-up form. They appear as a tab or a button on the lower corner of a user’s screen. They are designed to engage users, enabling them to get in touch with your team with any questions or issues, at any time.
Offering support on chat, or via customer support widgets on the website helps reduce friction.
Advantages of having a support widget
Providing customer services is an important part of your customer support strategy, as is staying in touch with your customers through every step of their buyer journey with your brand. They offer a few benefits:
>> Enable multiple ways to provide customer support such as:
- Website support
Customers are likely to first look up a website to gather contact details. Use a chat widget on your website to make it convenient for customers to reach out to you. - In-app support
In-app support is the most effective way to ensure that you are providing a better experience to customers. Nowadays customers want to raise issues or contact via the app. In-app support is beneficial for users who do not want to go through the hassle of going to the website to get support. - Messaging apps
It is likely your customer or potential customer prefers to use a social media channel like Facebook. You can use messaging apps like Facebook Messenger to offer support. This gives them the freedom to choose the support channel they prefer when getting in touch with you.
Using a combination of the above makes it easy for your customers to reach out to you across multiple customer touchpoints, enhancing their experience with your brand.
>> Resolve issues faster
Customers today no longer have the time or patience to experience a long wait time for a response, whether it is on-call or via email. In such instances, customers prefer the chat widget over other support channels. Since there’s little to no wait-time involved, issues can be resolved faster compared to other methods, making it an extremely appealing alternative to traditional forms of customer support.
>> Offer multilingual assistance
Being able to offer support is great. However, if your customer base is spread all over the world a support widget can help you offer customer service in a local language or a language of their preference. This can result in improved customer satisfaction, aside from quicker resolution of issues.
>> Make it easier and quicker for customers to connect
Traditionally, when customers wanted to reach out to a company, they would go the long way round by gathering details from a company’s website and then get in touch with them.
Offering support on chat, or via customer support widgets on the website helps reduce friction ensuring that they are able to get support easily without having to take too many steps.
>> Expand team capabilities and support multiple conversations
A support widget makes it possible to handle multiple conversations at once, allowing a team to address many individual concerns at the same time.
This is because the customer support team can engage with multiple customers at once. This increases your team’s efficiency and productivity. The result is maximized usage of available resources, and reduced costs for your business.
>> Offer proactive assistance
Offering proactive assistance involves forecasting customer issues ahead of time and keeping them informed while an issue is being processed or addressed.
For example, in the retail business — you can update the user about the delivery method you intend to use and its status, both during and after delivery.
This results in a more personalized customer experience, which can help create positive associations about the product and the company in the customer’s mind.
>> Provide an effective self-service option that augments FAQs & help documentation
Not every issue requires the assistance of the customer support team. For smaller issues, customers prefer to find answers on their own — often through FAQs or help documents and videos.
Today many widgets can be configured to offer automated responses and can surface relevant help documents based on a user’s query. This further extends their capabilities, helping customers find solutions to some issues on their own.
Conclusion
Overall, using a customer support widget lets your business:
- Reduce customer support tickets
- Increase conversions in a timely fashion
- Improve customer trust, help generate leads, and sales
- Connect with potential customers more effectively
- Boost user Engagement
- Help improve revenue growth
- Deliver lasting customer success
- Maximize related resource usage and efficiency
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Author — Sunayana Paikaray, DLT Labs™
About the Author: Sunayana is a Business Analyst at DLT Labs who has completed her Masters of Business Administration in Finance & HR. In her spare time, she loves to dance, sing, and indulge in creative activities. She also likes to meditate in her free time.
