What is chat support, and when is it worth offering?

How chat support works#

A customer clicks the chat bubble on your site, or messages you on WhatsApp or Instagram, and types a question. Someone replies within a minute or two, and the conversation goes back and forth until it's sorted.

That someone used to be an agent juggling three or four chats at once. These days it's often an AI agent that answers first and passes the harder cases to a person.

Chat vs email and phone#

Chat sits between the two. It's much faster than email, and the customer can carry on browsing while they wait, which nobody can do on hold. Your team gets something out of it too: one agent can run several chats at once, where a phone call ties them up completely.

When chat support pays off#

Chat earns its place when customers have questions while they're deciding to buy, or when the answer needs a quick back-and-forth. A sizing question on a product page, or "did my order go through?" a minute after checkout: answer those slowly and you lose the sale, or get a ticket you didn't need.

It's a poor fit for things that take days anyway. A warranty claim waiting on photos and a warehouse inspection is fine by email.

Someone has to answer#

A chat bubble promises a fast reply. If nobody's around at 9pm on a Sunday, the customer gets an offline form, which is email with extra steps, and they're more annoyed than if you'd never offered chat at all.

The software's the cheap part. Covering the hours your customers actually shop is what costs money, and for a small team it usually means choosing between a gap in the evenings and a hire for the evening shift.

How Hay.chat runs chat support#

Hay.chat puts an AI agent on your website chat, and on WhatsApp and Instagram if you connect them, and it answers at any hour. It works from your docs and, with your store connected, from the order itself. So it can tell a customer where their parcel is or change the delivery address, instead of promising that someone will look into it tomorrow.

When it can't settle something, it hands the conversation to your team, who see everything said so far. You can run the same agent, with the same docs and playbooks, on every channel. And if your team already works in Chatwoot, Hay.chat can answer inside your Chatwoot inboxes instead.