10 Best Practices to Improve Customer Service Live Chat

Live chat has become a crucial channel for delivering quick and effective customer service. It provides the immediacy customers crave while allowing businesses to address queries efficiently. However, the quality of these interactions can vary greatly depending on how well they are handled.

To ensure your live chat service leaves a positive impression and enhances customer satisfaction, we have put together some best practices for improving the quality of communication on live chat and providing better customer service.

10 Live Chat Customer Service Tips

1. Remember That It’s a Chat

Our first live chat best practice is to remember that this is not a transaction, a letter from a lawyer or a set of terms and conditions, it’s a chat. So, it needs to sound like a natural conversation between two people.

For advisors that struggle to do this, Neil Martin, the Creative Director at The First Word, suggests asking them “to have a conversation with the customer on the phone, while typing what they say directly into the live chat. Ask advisors to think about what they would say when speaking to a customer face-to-face.” 

Don’t Be Too Formal

According to Neil, a major problem that many advisors have is being too formal over chat, and he suggests inviting the advisor to consider asking themselves “would I say this at home?” before pressing Send.

To highlight this point, the following is a real live chat comment posted by an advisor at a well-known utilities company:

No one speaks like this. It is very formal, contains a lot of jargon and is far too long. Each of these factors makes the customer feel as though they are talking to a robot. Why doesn’t the advisor write what they would be inclined to say? Perhaps something like the below:

• “Could you give me your meter reading please?”

It can be as easy for the advisor as typing what they would say on the phone directly into the chat window.

2. Show Real Empathy

Empathy is just as important on live chat as it is when speaking to a customer on the phone. This live chat best practice is often something that’s easy to forget. Neil Martin says that:

“it is easy to jump into the solution or the fix when the customer has just said something that was really upsetting or important to them. In these scenarios, however, showing empathy must be a priority.”

To demonstrate how this lack of empathy can damage a brand’s relationship with its customers, Neil uses a serious complaint that went to a train company via live chat. The complaint read:

To this message, a response that should NOT be acceptable would be something like this:

• “Please accept our apologies for any distress caused. In order to investigate, I require the station your daughter alighted the train.”

The advisor who makes a comment like this is going to have to work hard to win the customer back, as they’ve missed a golden opportunity to show that they’re really listening to what is important to the customer.

So, as an alternative, another advisor from the train company suggested saying:

• “I’m very sorry to hear this, Frank. I understand this must have been very upsetting for your daughter. So I can look into this, could you let me know which station your daughter got off at please?”

This is a much better example and highlighted this time are the words and phrases that make this a great empathy statement.

For more examples of empathy statements your agents can use, read our article: 18 Empathy Statements That Help Improve Customer-Agent Rapport

3. Avoid Passive Writing – Stay Active!

Politicians love to speak in the passive. “Mistakes were made” became a mantra of the Clinton US presidency and has been used by a series of politicians since to get out of sticky situations.

Removing personal pronouns, like in the statement above, is essentially a tool to deny responsibility. So, while this may work in politics, it definitely should not be used in the contact centre. This leads us into our third live chat best practice, that you stay active in your live chat.

Using this logic, make sure advisors take personal responsibility for a customer’s issue and use words such as “I” and “you”, to ensure customers feel as though they have someone inside the business personally working to resolve their issue.

Also, just as an advisor is encouraged to do on the phone, use active verbs to signal to the customer that their issue is a key priority to the company.

Saying that “your contact is a priority” will likely irritate the customer, as they will realise the number of contacts an advisor takes each day and may think they are being lied to. So, an advisor should use active language to show them instead.

For example, compare the statements:

• “This will be processed by [X]”
• “I will ask [X] to process this for you”

The second phrase is clearly an improved version, with activity and personality.

How Can Advisors Ensure They Don’t Cross From the Active to the Passive?

In our webinar ‘How to Give the Wow Factor on Email and Live Chat‘. Neil Martin recommended the “by robots” test, which works by asking advisors to review each sentence and mentally add the words “by robots” to the end.

If the statement still makes sense, it is in the passive voice; if not, it is active, and the advisor can press Send.

For example, here are a few common phrases that are used in customer service: 

• “Your complaint is being investigated… by robots” – Makes sense, so it’s PASSIVE and should not be used.
• “I am looking into your complaint… by robots” – Doesn’t make sense, so it’s ACTIVE and can be used.
• “All complaints are taken seriously… by robots” – Makes sense, so it’s PASSIVE and should not be used.
• “We take all complaints seriously… by robots” – Doesn’t make sense, so it’s ACTIVE and can be used.

As these examples demonstrate, the passive statements remove that sense of ownership and the active statements are more believable.

4. Offer a Survey for Feedback, But Keep It on the Same Channel

Using customer feedback to improve service should be done across all contact centre channels, ideally using the same metric.

Customer Effort is a good KPI to use across all channels, as the contact centre can ask the customer the same question on each: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request, on a scale of 1-5?”

This helps the contact centre track the performance of its advisors. If the scores are fed back to the advisors, the team can self-learn.

They can discover which techniques help reduce customer effort, as seen in HomeServe’s contact centre in Walsall. On live chat, this allows advisors to develop the best language, techniques, and tricks to use on the channel.

If you want practical methods to collect customer feedback, read our article: 25 Good Examples of How to Collect Customer Feedback

What is the Best Way to Run a Customer Feedback Survey on Live Chat?

Aruf Khan, a Senior Manager of Client Engagement at NICE| Nexidia, believes that “the best practice would be to keep it within the same platform as the chat, as it’s a better experience and the customer is more likely to leave a response. This would also make it easier for data analysts to join the results with the interaction itself.”

However, the customer may feel awkward giving feedback directly to the advisor, and this could also produce biased results.

So, the advisor could instead send the customer a link at the end of the live chat interaction to a site like SurveyMonkey, where they may feel more comfortable relaying honest feedback.

This feedback can then be used by advisors to self-learn and by the contact centre to gauge any changes to customer satisfaction when a process has been altered on the live chat channel.

If you are struggling to collect customer feedback, read our article: 9 Ways to Encourage Customers to Give Feedback

5. Find Ways to Personalise the Conversation

Personalisation is about understanding what the query is and trying to link it to something that the organisation already knows about the customer, which may sound simple, but is difficult to do in practice.

This is according to Mike Murphy, an Account Executive at Genesys, who says that “this kind of personalisation gives that kind of wow factor, as the customer thinks ‘you’ve thought about me, you’ve made me feel special today’.”

So, the contact centre should look to keep track of previous engagements with customers, from how often they call to recent purchases and complaints, to make it easier for advisors to deliver a personalised interaction.

In addition, advisors on the live chat channel can make a note when the customer reveals a piece of information such as “I have two dogs”, and log it in the knowledge management system. Then, during future interactions, advisors can casually mention that information to help demonstrate commonality and build rapport.

Nicola Millard, who is Head of Customer Insight and Futures at BT, adds that “as many companies are putting more into self-service and automation, the last thing an organisation wants is for advisors to become robots.”

“It is all about using those lovely things that we have within chat, rather than giving customers a standard set of responses.”

So, it is arguably most important for advisors on the live chat channel to provide a personalised service, as while chatbots are starting to emerge on this channel, this is something that they cannot yet do.

6. Don’t Ask for Too Much Information at Once

When customers initiate a live chat, they’re often looking for quick help. Asking for too much information upfront – like phone numbers, account IDs, or email addresses – can create unnecessary friction and discourage them from starting the conversation.

To make the process easier, it’s a good practice to only ask for their name to begin with. This way, you keep the entry point simple and welcoming. For instance:

• “Hi! What’s your name, so I can help you better?”

Once the chat is underway and you understand their issue, you can gradually ask for more details:

• “Could you give me your order number so I can check on this for you?”

This approach feels natural and conversational, helping build trust and rapport. Customers will appreciate the smooth experience and the fact that you respect their time.

Contributed by: Stuart

7. Treat the Customer as a Friend

A friendly and personable tone can go a long way in making customers feel valued and heard. Contact centres that avoid robotic, canned responses tend to receive positive feedback and build stronger relationships with their customers.

Encourage advisors to approach live chat conversations as if they were helping a friend. For example, instead of saying:

• “Your request has been received and is being processed.”

They could say:

• “Got it! I’ll take care of this for you right away.”

This type of response feels warmer and more human. Small touches, like using the customer’s name or adding friendly phrases like “no problem” or “happy to help!”, can make a big difference.

8. Make Sure the Live Chat Team Have the Right Personalities

The success of live chat often comes down to the people behind the screen. Hiring advisors with the right personalities – those who are naturally friendly, empathetic, and adaptable – can significantly enhance the quality of live chat interactions.

Advisors should feel comfortable engaging in casual conversation and not rely on stiff, overly formal language. Instead of saying:

• “I will assist you with your inquiry promptly,”

they can keep it natural with:

• “I can help you with that right now!”

Encourage advisors to let their personalities shine through in their writing. To avoid burnout and keep responses fresh and engaging, consider rotating team members through live chat in shorter shifts.

If you want to know how to train agents for live chat conversations, read our article: Training Your Staff to Be Effective at Live Chat

9. Mirror the Customer’s Use of Language

Mirroring the customer’s tone and language is a powerful way to build rapport and create a more comfortable interaction.

Just like on phone calls, adapting to the customer’s style helps establish a connection and makes the conversation feel more personal and engaging.

For example, if a customer writes in a friendly, casual tone, it’s best for the advisor to respond similarly. Instead of replying with:

• “We appreciate your patience while we resolve your inquiry,”

a mirrored response could be:

• “Thanks for hanging in there – I’m sorting this out for you now!”

This approach makes the conversation flow more naturally and helps the customer feel understood.

The same goes for emojis and emoticons. If a customer includes smiley faces or other symbols, then why not try using them too.

Contributed by: Steve

10. Tell Customers That Live Chat Responses Are Faster Than Email

If you want to increase the use of live chat, make sure customers know it’s the fastest way to get help. Highlight live chat as the most prominent contact option on your website and emphasize its speed compared to email.

A simple message like “Need help right now? Our live chat gets you a quicker response than email!” can encourage customers to choose chat over slower channels. You can display this message on contact pages, support sections, or even as a pop-up when a customer is about to send an email inquiry.

Contributed by: Lesley

For more live chat best practices and how to best train your advisors to engage in excellent live chat conversations, read these articles next:

• How to Write Good Customer Support Live Chat Scripts – With Examples
• Training Your Staff to Be Effective at Live Chat
• How to Forecast and Plan for Live Chat

Author: Charlie Mitchell
Reviewed by: Hannah Swankie