Email Vs Live Chat: Which Is Better For Contact Centers?

Customer engagement is becoming every business owner’s top priority. Businesses work hard to deliver a flawless customer experience, whether it is through phone calls, e-mail, live chat, or any other channels. Thus, there’s been a big trend for businesses to employ top-notch Contact Center Solution.

Today we will discuss what best suits a contact center business, E-mail or Live Chat Support.

The nature of customer service has changed dramatically over time, and now client expects prompt, effective solutions to their issues. Which one should you choose, live chat assistance or email support? Here are a few points to help you figure out the answer.

Content:

1. What is Live Chat Support?

2. What is Email Support?

3. What are the benefits of Live Chat Software?

4. What are the benefits of E-mail Support?

5. Benefits of email vs live chat support

6. When is email appropriate?

7. When is it appropriate to use live chat?

8. What channel should you begin with?

What is Live Chat Support?
It is a text-based real-time communication tool. One of the features of a help desk solution enables clients to get in touch with you through your website or mobile apps. With different messaging platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp chat is being offered across various channels. Web Live Chat is a solution that links clients with real people who can provide support. This enables users to fix problems right away. Customers who use live chat can get responses quickly. Customers can open a new chat window to ask for support, discuss problems, or communicate in any other way with customer service agents. They can accomplish this easily with Live Chat Software, and customer service representatives can handle problems swiftly and without escalation.

What is Email Support?
Over time, e-mails have evolved as a crucial component of the infrastructure of the customer service industry. Despite the rise of social media and Chatbots, there’s still a separate fan base for the email channel. Analysts indicate consistent user engagement as the biggest example of this. Accessible from anywhere and anytime, in the hope that concern will be resolved soon, is what makes e-mail support still preferred.

Live Chat Support is extremely useful when you need immediate, direct assistance. It enables a contact center to provide support and responses almost instantly. This translates to simple problem-solving, clear-cut issue explanations, and overall convenience for clients. Emails, on the other hand, work better for lengthy and complex issues. Concerns that require back-and-forth communication and are not time critical.

What are the benefits of Live Chat?
Provide prompt responses to customers
A prompt answer is essential when a customer texts you during lunch break or a website visitor comes by to ask about a product. Customers expect answers quickly; they don't want to spend time on the phone with your business. Customers can initiate real-time interactions with live chat agents faster than through any other help channel, which eliminates the requirement for rapid participation.

The efficiency of your customer service personnel is increased through Live Chat Software.

The most effective way to improve the productivity of your customer service employees is through live chat. Chat allows one to multitask compared to a phone call, whereas an email can only have one thing open at a time. Both agents and clients can multitask using live chat. A cost-cutting technique that enables agents to handle many chats at once, and consumers can follow up on service issues while going about their daily chores.

Improved Sales
Numerous studies have shown that Web Live Chat increases revenue and businesses are already reaping the benefits. It demonstrates that live chat is efficient in generating leads and closing deals. One of the main advantages of live chat is that it gives visitors quick access to your customer service representatives and sales team. As a result, your team has many more opportunities to convert these prospects into paying clients or customers. A simple way is to provide links or attachments to ongoing offers which are not convenient to share over a phone call.

Personalized Approach
Live Chat Support makes it simpler to include a personalized and human touch to the conversations whereas e-mail usually takes a formal tone. Email's propensity for lengthy responses, as opposed to living chat's small character limit, can change how you present your business to your target audience. Since you respond in real-time and with brief messages, the live chat's tone is easier to adapt.  According to Crazyegg, Live Chat helped over 38% of customers make better decisions with product selection.

Insight into Reporting and Data
Reviewing employee performance regarding email assistance, however, can be challenging unless you review every mail communication, and many times the resolution provided over the email can get reopened, so it’s difficult to assume a first contact resolution.

When employing a top-notch Live Chat Provider, you may access several custom reports as well as the conversation histories of each agent. You may examine how many visitors your site receives, how many chat requests are granted or denied, and a variety of other visitor metrics that can improve your business with access to this type of data.

What are the benefits of E-mail Support?
Accessible from anywhere
The fact that Email Support services are so accessible is one of its best features. Customers frequently require assistance right away and wish to contact your company to solve their problems. Nowadays, everyone owns a smartphone to which they have configured their email account. Even if customers are on the go, they can still email you with their queries. This ease merits bonus points for fostering client loyalty as well.

Record
With e-mail, another advantage is that everything is recorded or has proof. While Live Chat Software transcripts are also available over email but mail support provides threaded communication.

Customers are more at ease communicating with your support employees as a result. They feel safe that they have a record of the conversation that will be useful if there is ever a disagreement in the future.

Turn leads into customers
Customers today only want to spend money on worthwhile things. While examining the products on your website, they have a lot of questions, which they typically seek a response to. Contact Center Agents can make efficient use of this chance to thoroughly respond to the customer's inquiries, describing all the benefits and characteristics of the product in addition to including any pertinent images that will encourage the buyer to purchase the item.

Attachments
It enables your clients to include files to further describe the problem they're having, such as pictures, videos, documents, etc. Additionally, your agents can give customers attachments that either point them in the right direction for problem-solving or demonstrate that a problem has been fixed. This is helpful to give the customer better clarity.

‍

Benefits of email vs live chat support

Email	Live chat
Cost-effective: Email is one of the most basic and often least expensive channels.	Increase the efficiency of your customer service: Each representative can handle multiple customers at once.
Flexible: Email is versatile in that it allows you to include images, font styling, infographics, and forms.	Optimize conversions: You can target customers and display a chat window when they need assistance.
Scalable: Whether you have 500 customers or 500 million, email can handle it.	Direct interaction: Your customer service representatives speak directly to your customers when they are in need.
Brand awareness: You can guarantee your email content style & template match your brand’s customer support standard	Quick responses: You can get immediate feedback from customers on what works and what doesn't.
All customers are on an equal footing: Almost everyone knows how to send and receive email.	Resolution time: Live chat resolution times are typically shorter than other channels.
No need for an immediate response: Customers don’t typically expect an immediate response from email, which means your team has a little more leeway for discovery and troubleshooting.	Empathy: The type of conversation and dialogue that takes place over chat can assist customers in feeling more deeply understood.
Identity verification is much easier: When someone sends an email, it is much easier to verify whom they are based on the registered mail id and reference no provided by the sender.	Easy involvement for other teams: Other teams can easily participate: If other teams, such as marketing or sales, want to engage customers, they can do so with chat. Even the same chat can be put in conference mode or transferred to another team.

When is email appropriate?
Email is ideal for communicating technical issues or confirming identity. The live Chat Software isn't ideal for sending screenshots, code, or URLs, which can quickly become lost in the flow of conversation. Email also leaves a trail, allowing you to see what information the customer has or hasn't sent.

With email-based ticket management, automatically tickets or cases can be created in the Helpdesk CRM. This ensures efficient follow-up on the issues and they are tracked to closure within a predefined turnaround time (TAT)

Email is also very cost-effective and serves the greatest number of customers — almost everyone has access to an email provider. Chat applications, on the other hand, cannot be guaranteed to work on every device and operating system. If you're just getting started in customer service, email support is a great place to start to serve the most people at the lowest cost.

When is it appropriate to use live chat?
Live Chat Software is ideal if you are into B2C business and want to increase conversions in a product-led growth model. Similarly, if your product is aimed at younger or more mobile-driven demographics, you may discover that they prefer to use live chat more.

Use the live chat to assist customers in context with issues they are experiencing on your account or billing pages, or to direct quick responses to easily-answered inquiries.

What channel should you begin with?
Offering a seamless customer experience is the key to the future of customer communication, regardless of the industry you target. To deliver a seamless and contextualized digital client journey, choosing the best contact center solution is a crucial step. According to a survey by Zippia, U.S. companies lose over $62 billion in annual revenue due to poor customer service. A poorly crafted e-mail can completely ruin your business, but when done well, it has numerous benefits as we've already covered.

Since email has been around for a while, practically everyone can use it. Both tech experts and those with less technical knowledge find it appealing. However, Live chat software is comparatively a newcomer to the industry. So, briefly put, different target markets often favor various channels. The first thing to consider is what your customers want, followed by a check of your contact center's capabilities.

What’s your contact center’s strength? If your customer is more chat or messaging savvy, then integrate a Live Chat Solution into the system; all these questions must be discussed. If the response is positive then without a doubt you may implement CZ Chat in your system.