Customer chat history: a feature dive

Customer retention is, as they say, cheaper than acquisition. It’s a sign of a healthy customer experience. It also means that you’ll have returning customers.

And returning customers bring with them the opportunity for unique experience personalisation. To seize that opportunity, you need to be able to adapt your service based on customer history. Enter WhosOn’s customer chat history feature.

Here’s what you need to know.

What is customer chat history?

Customer chat history is a WhosOn feature that recognises return chatters and lets you see your past interactions with them.

So, you start the chat session primed to pick up where you left off.

When a chat user comes back to reengage, customer chat history enables you to greet the customer with all the relevant account information to hand.

How does it work?

WhosOn’s tracking functionality means the software recognises any returning visitors to your website. First, this means you get a history of the return user’s visits to your website.

But, more importantly for your conversation, WhosOn also retains a log of any previous chat sessions which the return visitor had on your website.

And, conveniently, you can view those previous exchanges from inside the chat client.

So, you can view all the user’s previous chat sessions, and pull in the user’s CRM data too. (Provided you’ve integrated WhosOn with your CRM.)

This means that you can not only identify the customer status but get a feel for their relationship with your business.

Who uses customer chat history? Who benefits?

Your live chat agents use customer chat history, but it’s primarily your customers that benefit from the feature.

Returning customers get to launch their chat session without repetitions and reintroductions. This, in turn, creates a stronger sense of connection with your business. Each returning customer feels recognised, listened to and cared about.

All of which helps to nurture a sense of loyalty to your business.

That doesn’t mean that customer chat history offers no benefits to your agents. For agents, this feature saves both time and awkward chat openings.

They don’t waste time (or annoy the customer) fumbling around to get information they should already have. Instead, your team can smoothly get on with finding solutions right off the bat.

Why is customer chat history useful?

You can’t always tie up every customer service interaction into a neat little bow after just one chat session. Sometimes, it takes a little more time. Or a few more follow-ups.

And even on the times that you can wrap-up quickly, you don’t start the relationship anew if the customer comes back.

That means that you need a way to keep track of the history you have with each customer. You need to keep on top of the multiple chats that inform a customer’s relationship with you. Customer chat history is how you do this.

The feature provides a simple way to nurture your customer relationships. Plus, it makes for smooth customer experiences by reducing the frustration of the repetitive.

In a nutshell, then, customer chat history is useful because building customer relationships takes more than one chat.

*With WhosOn, you can manage exactly how long you retain chat data for*

When might you use it?

You’ll use customer chat history any time a return customer connects to chat.

This might be a customer that bought once before and has come back for a second purchase. Or, it could be a customer that has gotten in touch with questions before but hasn’t bought yet, back in search of more assurance.

Maybe it’s a customer with an open ticket, getting in touch to keep working on an ongoing issue. It might be a customer that just wants to say thank you.

There are a lot of reasons for customers to come back to your chat channel. But whenever they do, that’s when you’ll use customer chat history.