Email and chat is like peanut butter and jelly, strawberries and cream, pancakes and maple syrup – great stuff, but they make even greater combinations when put together. When email and chat are fully integrated they form a dream team. A team called hybrid messaging.
Simply adding a chat tool to a website while using Outlook to handle email queries just won’t do the trick anymore. Disjointed channels of communication leave gaps in the customer’s support history, forcing you to piece together the two. You can choose to stick with email support, but in this age of of instant gratification customers will often deem it quicker and easier to find another vendor online than to send that email to you.
A tool with hybrid messaging integrates the two channels for you, so you can flexibly switch between chat and email mode depending on you and your customer’s online status. The chat mode kicks in when you’re both online: perfect for responding efficiently and engaging in real-time. And when either one of you goes offline the conversation can continue in email form, again to be resurrected as chat as soon as both parties come online.
Chat greatly reduces time consuming email ping pong, and with hybrid messaging you and your customer will get the benefit of a recorded conversation history in your inbox; so it works for those formal communications too.
Small businesses often dismiss a chat application because it’s perceived to: require 24-7 attendance; leave a bad impression with customers if ‘chat is offline’; or be too resource intensive. With hybrid messaging it’s not about either chat or email, it’s purely about the message. There’s one message board for the customer to input their enquiry, and whether that enquiry turns into a chat conversation or gets resolved via email is up to you.
Finally there’s flexibility for the small web shop owner to communicate how and when they want to depending on their capacity. Plus some helpful features such as canned responses to make resolving customer enquiries even quicker. Have a look. Pretty slick huh?
