Providing consistently reliable customer service is often a challenge for small businesses, given their limited resources and budgets. But LiveChat is aiming to change that, not only with their live chat support solutions but also with the introduction of the LiveChat Community Platform, a forum for customers to connect with fellow users, experts, and developers.
On the platform, customers can engage in conversations, ask support questions and seek out content pertaining to the products and services that interest them—24 hours a day, seven days a week. Topics in the forum range from chat greetings that work best for engaging customers to ideas for new chat widget customizations.
In a company statement, Agnieszka Jaskiewicz, community manager at LiveChat, stressed the importance of give and take with customers:
“We want to be in constant contact with our customers, listen to their feedback and keep them up to date with our updates. Many new features introduced to our products are born through communication with them.”
Because developers also use the community platform, customers can directly make recommendations or requests for future product updates, or ask developers for fixes to problematic existing functionalities. Overall, the new Community Platform is a forum for crowdsourcing support as well as driving product innovation.
According to LiveChat’s own research, demand for live chat on company websites grew by 8.3 percent in 2017, with small businesses seeing particularly high growth in demand—19 percent. For LiveChat, this is an opportunity to keep delivering solutions tailored to small-business needs and suited to address their limitations.
Jaskiewicz added that the platform intends to give customers a voice:
“Inclusion is a key word when it comes to building a strong community around a product. It is crucial to make people feel that they have an impact on the products they are using if we want them to use our solutions often and talk about them more.”