Phone support offers personalized experiences, but live chat agents can answer multiple inquiries more quickly. They both serve customers but they are the total opposite of each other. Phone support and text-based support or live chat each have their strengths and weaknesses and also differences. Companies need to know that so they can anticipate what each can serve, and what can go wrong with these customer support services.
What is the difference between text-based customer support and phone-based
Phone support always lets the customer call a phone number to reach an organization’s customer service department. Callers may ask questions about a certain product, accounts, and technical problems. They also train their service agents to quickly resolve these issues over the phone. Phone-based customer support also has its pros and cons.
One of its many benefits includes the following:
- Personal Connection with the person you’re talking to.
Using a phone can easily capture the speaker’s tone and emotion. With that, you can easily know what they feel about the topic that you’re discussing with each other, and it can also help foster personal connections between agents and customers.
- Can easily handle difficult issues and questions.
Trained agents who are good at communicating skills can easily handle the most difficult issues their customer is facing. They can suggest what’s best to do at such times by just talking to them. It can also help the customer relax their mind since they already heard what’s best to do at most.
- High Quality and service improvement.
The customer’s voice and emotion can provide a richer outcome in quality and service improvement analysis since the agent knows the amount of stress the customer feels in a certain problem. They can easily provide immediate remedies and great solutions for such things.
Although using a phone base has advantages, we cannot deny the fact that it also has its downsides.
Among them are as follows:
- Â Costly
Agents on a phone-based can only handle one customer at a time. In doing so, it can increase costs and decrease productivity because it cannot cater to everyone in phone-based customer service.
- Not very time wise
If you think every second in this world is too precious and should be spent wisely, phone-based support is not for you. It can frustrate customers with long waiting times and lengthy interactive voice responses.
- Documentation is not that very available
Some companies may not record every customer conversation unless a contact center implements routinely and monitors quality practices. It can also fail to document important conversations so it’s not that efficient for documentation purposes.
On the other hand, text-based customer or live chat support made the customers interact with a live agent or chatbot as they browse an organization’s or a company’s website or mobile application.
Let’s talk about chatbots
A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation through voice commands or text chat or both. Chatbot, in short for chatterbot, is an artificial intelligence (AI) feature that can be embedded and used through major messaging applications. There are several synonyms for chatbot, including “talkbot,” “bot,” “IM bot,” “interactive agent, ” or ” artificial conversation entity”. Customers that use live chat may have questions about products, pricing, or how to navigate the company’s website.
Live chat or text customer support has also its advantages which are listed below:
- It is much more accessible
Companies use live chat so that they can offer their customers 24/7 support for a lower cost. You can type a message easily without any hassle or waiting at all.
- Productivity of the agents
Agents can handle more than one chat at a time which means they can help many more customers, which increases their productivity at work.
- Automated responses and bots
Chatbot technology can also scam customers’ messages and will also respond as well without sometimes the aid of an agent.
- Lower cost
Using chatbots can lower the cost of the price than speaking to live agents. It responds automatically and there is no need to wait for a longer period. It’s also good to know their weaknesses so that one can know what problems the agents or the customers themselves can anticipate in the future.
- Prone to burnout
Live chat agents are prone to burnout because they serve multiple customers simultaneously. Their volume can easily cause burnout in the agents. Companies should also help their agents not to experience such a thing by putting procedures in place to properly balance and monitor the agent’s workload.
- Limited
The presence of legal compliance and regulatory restrictions, can sometimes prevent an agent from helping a customer, which frustrates them both. Companies should let customers know the type of questions that agents can handle.
- Delayed responses.
Customers always expect that when it comes to responding to their queries, it should always be fast, however, due to the multiple chats that come simultaneously, delayed responses can be expected which is not a great experience at all.
Key differences between text-based and phone-based support
Discussing the pros and cons of text-based and phone-based customer support only stated that every service agent has its strengths and weaknesses. One should also know their key differences because it can help a customer to know how different they are from each other.
Personal interactions
Phone support offers more personal interactions than text-based did. It does real-time interactions while text-based cannot do so since the agents juggle a lot of multiple conversations. It also added that phone-based agents deal with the customers’ tone of voice, so they can easily know what is the right thing to do.
Price
Text support costs much less than phone support because agents and chatbots can handle multiple customers at the same time.
Potential on sales
Chat agents can use proactive chat to start a conversation with potential customers as they browse the company’s website. By doing so, it allows chat agents to gain more customers, whereas the phone-based can never do since it’s a one-to-one interaction at a time.
When to choose text-based customer support
Texting or chatting for business has been around for some time now. Customers have been very open to it. It is also a very relatively new support medium. It is pretty common to offer a chat service on a company’s website, but that doesn’t mean most people have come around to using it. Breaking someone’s habit is hard, and getting people to try new things for a support channel is way harder.
Here is some reason why choosing text-based customer support is never ran out of style:
- Building personal connections with the person you texting to
If you want to be less formal, and formality sometimes rattles your nerves, text-based customer support is the best for you. It is less formal than phone or email. You can be yourself without being nervous at all which makes you at ease with the agent you’re texting to.
- Many Options
As a customer, you also want to know what you can get out of the available options. By using text-based, agents can easily inform you what you can get out of their services and much more in a more friendly and convenient way.
- Better efficiency for a better experience
Handling multiple conversations can increase productivity, therefore many customers can also experience less time waiting for replies from their respective agents. Knowing what text-based support can offer is a must for potential customers. They can anticipate what services they want, what they can expect, and why they have to choose text-based customer support.
When to choose phone-based support
We all live in the digital world surrounded by technology all over us. In the era of the internet, phone calls are still very popular. There are so many channels available these days, but people still use phone calls. Here are some reasons why it is still used up today even in this modern day.
- It brings emotions
If you want to be connected to someone you’re talking to, even if it will be an agent or not, it is the best way for you because it makes conversations more human. It brings about feelings of empathy to a discussion, making it more open, honest, and calming which can help the potential customers understand more about the topic the agents are talking about. It is also made in real-time which means the caller can talk about the issue right away.
- Using phone calls are known by almost everyone in every age
Unlike using websites and chatbots, phone calls can easily be done by everyone of every age. There is no age gap when it means talking to somebody through phones which only means that every potential customer can be accommodated.
- Having complex problems also needs complex solutions
Sometimes, some problems cannot be talked about through chatbots. If you’re uncomfortable typing long messages about your problems in chatbots or emails, phone calls are the best remedy for you. You can also easily receive immediate feedback since you’re talking with each other, it’s like talking face-to-face but with just a distance barrier. Communication with agents also helps with emergencies, so it should be a must to provide a channel like phone calls that allow for this.
Assisting customers via phone-based customer service is a game-changer. It can bring new value to you as a potential customer. Phone-based customer support is still a popular way to reach out to your concerns and queries. Even if technological progress is still rapid, people are still conscious about communicating with each other, especially talking to someone because in that way, even if divided by distance, you can still understand each other through expressing their feelings and emotions. It never ran out of style even in this era of technology.
Conclusion
To put an end to this, just bear in mind that phone-based and text-based customer support has their strengths and weaknesses as well as differences from each other. Phone-based can make the potential customers feel a connection towards the agents that can sometimes make them gain their trust, but on the other hand, it is also costly, and not very time-wise since delays can be expected. Meanwhile, text-based support, or what we called live chat uses chatbots that can reply to the customer’s queries real-quick because it scans messages and sends them right away the solutions, but it is also limited and delayed response can be expected since it can handle multiple messages at a time.
Nevertheless, it is all up to the customers to know what they want to utilize as a service from a certain company, whether it is called or text-based that uses modern chatbots. Knowing when you want to use them is also a must. If you doubt which type of support you need to choose, or how to build a modern customer experience department – don’t hesitate to contact Conectys. We have already become a trusted partner for clients from various industries and are ready for any challenges.
