Confused between Live Chat and Live Agent? Here’s What you Need to Know

Have you ever thought about what prospects expect from a brand?

It’s the quality customer service.

But unfortunately, most of the time, brands fail to live up to the expectations of their prospects and customers. As a result, brands tend to lose many business opportunities.

One of the major aspects of quality customer service is the short response time. Longer response time leads contributes to poor customer service as it might frustrate prospects and compel them to choose other competitors over you.

So to get around with a longer response time, firms are heading to round-the-clock support solutions. This is where live agents and live chat come into the picture.

But, to make the right decision, there is a need to understand both concepts thoroughly.

What is the difference between Live Chat and Live Agent?

The names are self-explanatory. Live agents allow prospects and customers to chat with a human agent in real-time to get answers to their questions and concerns. 

On the flip side, live chat also allows audiences to chat in real-time but with a chatbot, not with a human agent.

Both solutions help you communicate with audiences in real-time but have certain pros and cons that one must know about to make the right choice.

Live Agents

Pros

• Better Grievances Handling

Chatbot or live chat software can help you address the most common inquiries and questions but not complex ones. This is why live agents are better at grievance handling. They are humans, and their responses do not depend on incoming keywords.

Consequently, they can handle even complex inquiries much better, analyzing and understanding the human intent and tone. 

Cons

• Costly Option

At times, live agents for support can be a costly option. This is because you need a large pool of support agents and pay for their work. Also, you need to incur training costs.

This increases your business expenses. Besides, if you intend to render 24*7 support to your audiences, you need to hire additional resources who can work in night shift.

• Delayed Responses

Another aspect of live agent support is you can expect a delay in responses when an agent is not available at the desk or busy addressing inquiries from other prospects and customers.

Also, you cannot expect agents to stick to their office chairs for continuous 8 hours to respond to inquiries instantly.

Live Chat

Pros

• Cost-Effective Solution for Round-the-Clock Support

Live chat is a much more cost-effective option compared to live agents as it does not involve recurring payment of salaries to human agents.

Also, you no longer need to hire an additional team to render 24*7 support. And the best part is you can configure chatbots on your own with the 360 SMS app, which helps you cut back on Salesforce chatbot development costs. 

Chatbots work 24*7, and you can configure them to address FAQs. Also, this prevents support teams from repeating answers for common inquiries throughout the day.

• Better FCR (First Call Resolution)

Though chatbots can’t handle complex inquiries, they can help you improve first call resolution (FCR). You can configure them to collect essential data and qualify inquiries.

This way, you can escalate cases to the relevant department with all necessary data. This gives teams more time to prepare answers with appropriate solutions and resolve inquiries effectively over the first call.

• Instant Response

Chatbot capabilities do not have human limitations like mood swings. Thus, apart from responding instantly every time an inquiry comes in, they can handle multiple inquiries effectively at once. This is what makes them more reliable and effective.

Cons

• Can’t Handle Complex Inquiries

Chatbots are configured to address certain types of questions. So their answers may not be self-contained when a complex inquiry comes in.

As a result, customers don’t get satisfactory answers. And this may irate them. Besides, chatbots can’t improvise their responses using their knowledge and wisdom. After all, they are bots, not humans.

Which One to Choose? Live Agent or Live Chat

Both, live agent and live chat for support have their distinct qualities and drawbacks. A thorough study of live agents and chat can help users decide what matters to them the most and what not. But the solution could be to club live agents and chat-both to deliver quality support to audiences. You can use chatbots to qualify inquiries and handle common questions, whereas live agents to handle complex inquiries.

To know more about how you can configure a chatbot on your own, get in touch with our experts at care@360smsapp.com or contact us here.