Every Customer Care channel comes with its own benefits and challenges.
Live chat solutions help with conversions and also enable your clients to find a helping hand at every stage of their journey. Unfortunately, web chats are synchronous solutions that require a special level of care from your Customer Care team to reply all enquiries in a timely manner. Users’ expectations are high with such solution and it may quickly become a bottleneck if your team doesn’t have a proper solution to route and treat messages as they come.
On the other hand, messaging apps are a great solution to offer asynchronous conversations, giving your team additional flexibility and enabling the customers to contact you on his own schedule, as we explained it earlier this year with the example of WeChat. Unfortunately, messaging apps require to leave the merchant’s site, making it less convenient from a user’s perspective.
There is no doubt both channels are great and offer an exceptional customer experience when managed efficiently, but the choice between them can be difficult to make.
The launch of Messenger Customer Chat
Dimelo, as official Messenger partner, proudly announces the best of both worlds with the launch of Messenger Customer Chat.
This new Facebook website plugin changes the rules of web chats. Among other benefits, when connected to Dimelo, Messenger Customer Chat:
- Enables identification – while traditional live chats do not require the visitor to login, with Messenger each visitor is automatically identified. The identity merging algorithm inside Dimelo then enables Customer Care agents to access the full conversation across channels for each client and provide more accurate answers. In the end, the visitor benefits greatly from this identification: he no longer needs to repeat or identify himself and his problem or question finds a quicker answer.
- Enables persistent conversations – traditional live chats are anonymous, which means that the conversation ends when the window is closed, making it impossible to continue the discussion across devices or to return to it at a later stage. The visitor needs to re-explain his situation each time he opens a new chat. With Messenger Customer Chat, a visitor could start a conversation on the website then continue it at a later stage, from a different device, without losing track of the discussion.
- Enables asynchronous conversations – when a discussion is synchronous, both the visitor and the agent must focus on the conversation as it takes place, answer quickly and avoid distraction. With Messenger Customer Chat, the discussion becomes asynchronous, which gives additional flexibility to both the visitor and the agent, enabling them to feed the conversation at their own pace and schedule without taking the risk to lose track and restart from zero. That also means that the web-chat will no longer be limited to official working hours: like any messaging app, this plugin allows the visitor to ask a question at 2am in the morning and receive a reply later that day when an agent treats it.
The right approach to Customer Care channels
Messenger Customer Chat certainly offers some new great features, especially for companies that already have a strong presence on Facebook.
As we explained in an earlier article, the GAFA are taking a strong stand on the importance of messaging for businesses. Facebook Messenger connects over 1.2 billion people each month, with over 2 billion messages exchanges and 53% of people saying they are more likely to buy from a business they can message directly.
That being said, every channel has its own specificities, strengths and weaknesses and it is extremely important that you get proper guidance from a partner when selecting your solution to insure alignment with your vision and strategy.
Contact us today to discuss about Customer Care for your company.
Originally published Nov 13, 2017, updated Dec 30, 2022
