Boosting Employee Collaboration and Productivity With Live Voice Chat
As companies embrace flexible working, employees increasingly rely on virtual collaboration tools. These are great, but communication can quickly become disconnected and frustrating without a personal touch. Embedding real-time voice chat into your app can make a big difference for your users.
More Meaningful Communication
Email and instant messaging are vital tools for fostering collaboration and productivity, but over time, these impersonal methods of communication can negatively impact team camaraderie. Composing and responding to emails takes a lot of effort and time. With the risk of miscommunication, it can be easy for messages to be misinterpreted and critical information to get lost in translation. Using voice chat eliminates these obstacles and can help you improve your employees’ morale by providing them with more meaningful, immediate, and efficient communication. Voice solutions like Agora.io allow you to communicate at the moment with the click of a button, and their powerful native voice chat feature facilitates brainstorming and problem-solving while fostering team camaraderie. In addition to boosting morale, leveraging voice chat can improve the effectiveness of your business processes. For example, many customers skip calling a customer support hotline and use a live chat option on a company’s website to ask questions and receive assistance. When customers communicate with a customer support representative via a chat, they can hear the person’s tone, inflection, and emotions in their response, which can significantly enhance the customer experience. This type of meaningful communication can also provide valuable data for future customer feedback and surveys. With this nuanced insight, you can better serve your customers and ensure every interaction succeeds.
Convenience
Unlike phone calls, which require waiting for someone else to pick up or send an email to reply, a voice chat solution can be used anywhere your team has a smartphone and internet connection. It’s convenient for team members out of the office and gives employees the freedom to work on their tasks without interruption, a crucial aspect of employee retention. With the right live chat plugin, you can connect third-party messaging applications to your chat panel. This allows you to serve international customers and engage in conversations using their native language without any additional overhead. This enables you to be in the right place at the right time and deliver instant answers to your customers’ questions.
Depending on your business model, you can opt for a human + bot model that lets you deploy chatbots to answer the most frequently asked questions and free up agents to focus on high-value customers. With the ability to integrate a knowledge base into your chat widget, you can also use chat to push users to relevant documents or help articles so they can find and solve their problems without having to call for support. This way, you can increase customer retention and improve conversion rates.
More Efficient
When team members tap into the talents of colleagues throughout the organization, they can find unique solutions to complex problems. This allows them to be more productive and hit their KPIs. This type of collaboration is called sustainable productivity, a key component of success. This is because when employees feel they can reach out to their peers anytime, they can overcome a productivity slump and stay focused. Rather than going back and forth with emails or sifting through a sea of text messages, team members can easily talk to one another in real-time on a voice chat. This is because there’s no dialing or waiting on hold, and you can easily communicate with someone from a different time zone.
In addition to the instant messaging functionality, teams can collaborate on projects and tasks with file-sharing and video conferencing capabilities. The ability to pin files to specific chats ensures that these resources are readily available and streamlines project work. Robust administrative tools allow managers to oversee and delegate tasks, boosting team productivity.
Instant Feedback
Unlike email and IM, voice chat allows your team to receive immediate feedback from their peers. They can quickly ask for help with a project or an assignment and get their needed advice. This leads to higher–and more sustainable–productivity, as they spend less time searching for answers and more time hitting their KPIs. It’s also essential to provide your customers with quick responses, as their satisfaction is one of the leading drivers for doing business with you. This can be achieved by staffing your live chat with enough agents to handle the volume of questions or by implementing a robust customer success platform to manage conversations automatically. If you don’t have enough agents available to help every customer, you can let them know about average wait times in the chat window so they can choose a different channel if necessary. Or, you can use an intelligent chatbot to reduce wait times and keep your customers happy.
Adding live chat to your website is an easy way to make it easier for customers and prospects to reach you. This study found that it’s also a great way to drive more sales by helping your customers make the right decisions at critical moments in their journey. ICMI reports that customers who engage with you via chat convert 4.5 times better than those who don’t.