Top Rated: How to Create The Best Customer Experience with Live Chat

“To give anything less than your best, is to sacrifice the gift.” – Steve Prefontaine

How do you become the best? How do businesses deliver a great customer experience using live chat? In an era where customer experience is critical, we sought out to understand how businesses deliver remarkable service. To find the answer, we analyzed the top-rated Pure Chat customers. When website visitors end a conversation with a Pure Chat user, they have the option to rate the experience by clicking either a happy or unhappy face. We took a look at all the smiles and all the frowns and stack-ranked the ratings. In this three-post series with our new infographic, we learn how these businesses became the best. 

Maran Hidskes from Bytesized Hosting has the highest “happiness” rating of all Pure Chat users–a 99% approval rating! Based in the Netherlands, Maran’s hosting companies provides high traffic, high storage solutions. He provides easy to use tools to install apps with one click.

Maran has been working on Bytesized Hosting for six years. It was only in July 2014 that he decided to work full-time on the business. It was at that time that he started using Pure Chat.

Historically he has only provided chat on his website for sales conversations and he used a ticketing system for support questions. More recently, however, he has started to make Pure Chat available for support questions, too.

After analyzing the highest-rated Pure Chat customers, we found that Maran was #1! He has a 99% positive response rate. His positive response rate was so high we called Maran! We had to find out how he does it!

So, what’s his secret ingredient? Common sense and instant answers. Maran shared with us that he thinks his stellar customer experience is because he is the owner, developer and support. He wears every hat in the business which means he has the answer to every question.

He finds that most support and sales teams aren’t empowered to make their own decisions. And if they can’t solve a customer’s issue immediately, they just resort to email which is slow. Maran’s advice to other small business owners is to empower their people. Empowering your front-line sales and support teams will improve speed. And speed is key!

Maran’s other piece of advice is to always assume the problem is your fault. If you assume the issue your fault, there’s no arguing. “Sometimes you have very nasty customers. Some people are so nasty. If you shower them with love, they will come around. Kill them with kindness. A nice and polite attitude goes a long way,” says Maran.

Why should other small businesses use live chat? Maran shared that the reason to use live chat is because it solves problems really quickly and prevents them from growing bigger. “Live chat ensures your customers are heard. It’s a fast response. Live chat prevents a small problem from not getting attention becoming a bigger problem over time,” he said.

Want to improve your customer experience with live chat? Here are the top five tips from our most successful customers!