Live chat plays a crucial role for businesses as it provides a fast channel for online communications. With the growing adoption of digital platforms worldwide and customers' exposure to online options, it becomes necessary to maintain chat quality to keep customers loyal to your product and services.

This guide acquaints you with some of the best live chat practices followed in the industry.

• Always show empathy: Customers who come to you for help and connect over a chat may have looked for a solution to their unresolved queries. It is also possible that they looked online for available help resources to try and resolve their queries before connecting over chat. Hence when you receive a chat, try approaching them with empathy. Consider yourself in a similar situation and provide the best possible solutions that you have for their queries.
  
  
• Avoid passive voice: Using a passive voice can indicate denial of responsibility. Hence never use a passive voice while chatting with your customers. On the other hand, using an active voice conveys that the agent has taken the responsibility for the customer's issue.
  Always use words like "I" and "you" in chats. It can make the customers feel like they have someone in the organization working personally to resolve their queries.
  
• Respond promptly: Assisting your customers promptly can help you build a good relationship with them. Practicing fast and accurate resolution of your customer's queries can place you as a quality service provider in your business space. While attending to a chat request, consider it is also possible that the customer has gone through IVR routings and chatted with your Chatbot before connecting with you. Respect the customer's wait time and try answering their queries promptly. Create a canned responses library that can help provide a faster response.
  
  If the customer's queries remain unanswered, consider escalating the chat to your manager or supervisor. If you realize that the customer's queries can be handled better by another team within your organization, consider transferring the chat to that department.
• Ask the right questions: Asking the right questions can take you closer to providing correct solutions. While attending to a chat request, always ask the right questions. This helps you understand the customer's issues better and serve them appropriately. Asking relevant questions can also help maintain the flow of a live chat and lead it to resolution.  
• Chat etiquette: Practicing appropriate chat etiquette can be a crucial differentiator and set your chat quality apart from your competitors. Greet the customers in a positive tone. Customers want optimistic and solutions-driven people handling their queries. Be proactive and try to understand the customer's needs. Show professionalism through good grammar and spelling. Avoid using terms that a customer wouldn't understand. If you need to use a specific term, try to simplify what you mean. Consider using canned responses to avoid delayed replies while chatting with multiple customers. If appropriate for your organization's communication style, use emojis to help build a human touch.  
   
• Product knowledge: Be in constant touch with the latest developments and every feature of your product well. This helps understand the customer's queries and guide them in the correct directions with appropriate steps and resolutions. Plan regular learning and training sessions whenever significant changes happen in your product.  
• Customer survey: Customer surveys play a crucial part in the continuous quality of the chat services you provide. If the chat resolved customers' queries, design a survey with questions that could provide details like ratings and comments. Encourage your customers to share any ideas that they have to improve the chat experience.
  
  Collate the survey feedback and analyze them. Share the feedback with your chat team and continuously improve the chat quality.

Once you craft the best practices that suit your business, train your chat team to practice them while attending to chat requests. Assess the chat quality that your team provide regularly and work with them to improve chat quality continuously.