Behind every small comfort we enjoy lies immense unseen effort. Live chat has established itself as a preferred form of business communication, offering real-time engagement, convenience, higher conversion rates, and consistent quality at scale, which both businesses and customers prefer. But behind that lies a complex operational reality. This article examines the seven common live chat challenges businesses face and provides guidance on how to overcome them.

Key takeaways

  • Balance speed with strategy: Set realistic response expectations, plan resources wisely, and maintain clear, consistent communication to deliver quality support.
  • Empower teams with smart tools: Use scalable, well-integrated, AI-driven platforms to manage knowledge, streamline workflows, and sustain growth.
  • Protect trust at every step: Prioritize data privacy, security, and compliance to ensure safe, reliable, and customer-centric live chat experiences.

Top challenges in live chat support

  • 1. Setting customer expectations
  • 2. Resource allocation and volume constraints
  • 3. Communication limitations
  • 4. Knowledge management
  • 5. Tool and technology limitations
  • 6. Scaling and growth
  • 7. Privacy, security, and compliance

Setting customer expectations

While live chat creates an expectation of instant responses and quick solutions, it's not always practical for businesses to deliver that level of immediacy all the time. With limited resources, teams need to be deliberate about how they manage availability and workloads.

Before making promises to customers, align your team internally on what they can realistically deliver. Define your service level agreement (SLA), communicate it clearly, and ensure that customers understand what to expect from your service. Setting expectations up front establishes trust and prevents disappointment later.

Resource allocation and volume constraints

As live chat demands instant attention, businesses face the challenge of having enough people available to handle queries as they come in. Because chat volume can fluctuate unpredictably, maintaining the optimal team size without incurring excessive operational costs becomes a constant balancing act.

Along with the numbers, it's also about having the right mix of people and skills to manage conversations efficiently. Without proper planning, teams risk slower responses, poor service quality, and frustrated customers, which ultimately leads to burned-out agents.

Communication limitations

As much as a good live chat experience can put a business on the good side of customers, a small mistake can take it to the other end of the satisfaction spectrum. Because without the voice/visual layer to support, chat conversations can be misread easily, as something phrased efficiently may sound abrupt to another.

Language plays a crucial role in live chat communication, particularly when the conversation is conducted in non-native languages. The business must maintain a professional tone of voice and ensure it's consistently delivered across all customer touchpoints.

Knowledge management

Instant responses add value to customers and lead to instant resolution only when the shared responses are actually correct. Otherwise, they accumulate and increase the existing volume, defeating the purpose of providing live chat. One of the biggest challenges in live chat is ensuring that agents have access to all the necessary information and proper knowledge management.

Knowledge management should be regularly updated with new information, categorized clearly for faster look-ups, and have quick searchability for finding answers when in doubt.

Tools and technology limitations

When businesses provide live chat, it goes without saying that they should be mindful of the technical limitations and ensure that issues such as slowness, latency, downtime, system overload, integration restrictions, and other problems don't occur. Additionally, since customers expect instant answers, the chat interface should be equipped with tools that help businesses better understand the query and provide a more effective resolution.

For example, in instances where the customer is unable to express their concerns clearly, the live chat should have the option to connect with them over an audio call. If there is something they'd like to show that the businesses need to troubleshoot, there should be a screen-sharing or remote assistance option to see what the issue is, take control, and resolve it.

Integration limitations also play a significant role in determining the quality of the customer engagement experience. If the data is scattered across various systems or siloed, it restricts businesses from providing the best possible support to their customers.

Scaling and growth

Any live chat process started for a small team will struggle to scale as the business grows. It'll become challenging to provide the same engagement experience across all the customer touchpoints when more customers and chat queries are added to the mix. It'd be difficult to maintain the same quality at the pace at which the business is growing, while ensuring everyone's aligned on the brand voice and structure.

Privacy, security, and compliance

Since live chat conversations involve sharing personal or sensitive information, it's critical to ensure that the data displayed is properly collected, stored, and securely accessed when needed.

Adding a privacy and security layer increases the operating cost of the business, and it needs to be constantly monitored to ensure there is nothing out of line. Businesses should also comply with all the regional and global standards to run their operations if they're attracting global customers.

How Zoho SalesIQ can help you mitigate these live chat challenges

Zoho SalesIQ is an engagement platform that offers live chat functionality, chatbot builders, visitor analytics, and an extensive reports module, as well as combining automation and AI capabilities. It's perfect for businesses that want to provide an engaging live chat experience to their customers without worrying about the challenges.

Combining AI bots with live chat

To set the right expectations and handle the resource-volume constraint, using SalesIQ's chatbot in combination with live chat can be beneficial for businesses. SalesIQ has an AI bot called Answer Bot. When deployed, it'll take care of routine and repetitive customer queries, providing instant responses and resolutions.

More than half of the incoming queries will be handled by the chatbot, leaving your live chat agents to focus on more critical tasks/queries. Only when the chatbot is unable to provide answers is the query routed to the available live agents.

Additionally, as businesses expand, SalesIQ's live chat can be scaled with chatbots to handle the increasing volume, mitigate resource constraints, and exceed customers' expectations.

Related read: AI in live chat

Zia and ChatGPT for uniform brand voice

To overcome communication limitations and maintain a consistent brand voice across all customer touchpoints, AI writing assistants can be used. These assistants are powered by Zoho's in-house LLM, Zia, which comes built into the platform. If you prefer to use a third-party provider, SalesIQ also provides a direct integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Multi-mode support and multi-channel presence

The platform is equipped with all the functionalities one would need to connect with customers. Businesses can connect with their customers over an audio call with just a click, without needing to install any software. SalesIQ comes with a built-in screen-sharing option, allowing customers to share their screen and show what's bugging them. If required, via an integration with Zoho Assist, customer devices can be accessed remotely to help them resolve the issue.

Not only that, SalesIQ's live chat can be deployed across all primary messaging channels and social media platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Line, WeChat, and Telegram. Suppose someone reaches out to your business from these handles—your team will be able to respond to them instantly from SalesIQ's unified dashboard without having to scramble off to each platform, saving time.

Privacy and security is built into our fabric

SalesIQ comes with Zoho's industry-leading privacy and security policies. It also complies with all paramount global privacy and security policies, such as GDPR, SOC-2, and DPDPA, to ensure that data is stored, accessed, and retrieved securely whenever needed.

Additionally, Zoho runs its solutions on our own servers and has local data centers to ensure data residency compliance. Chats between businesses and customers are encrypted at rest and in transit to ensure customer data is protected.

Apart from this, the platform also supports additional security features, including credit card masking, JWT authentication, Single sign-on, and DOS (Denial of Service) protection.

Related read:How AI chatbots can handle privacy, security, and data concerns

If you'd like to learn more about how SalesIQ can benefit your business, you can sign up for a 15-day free trial or schedule a demo with our team.

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FAQs on challenges in live chat support

What causes repetitive questions even after deploying chatbots?

Repetitive questions occur when the chatbot can’t fully resolve queries or has outdated or incomplete information. In such cases, SalesIQ’s Unanswered Questions (UAQs) feature identifies queries the bot couldn’t handle, allowing you to update or expand the related information to improve future responses.

How can I maintain chat quality when agents copy-paste canned replies?

Canned replies help agents assist customers at scale, but they can make conversations sound templated. SalesIQ offers built-in writing assistants powered by Zia, our proprietary AI, to help agents personalize canned responses and make them sound more natural. We also provide writing assistants powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, allowing businesses to choose the assistant that best fits their needs.

How can I sync live chat conversations with CRM without data mismatches?

To ensure all live chat conversations sync correctly with your CRM, integrate your chat platform with the CRM and use matching data fields on both. SalesIQ offers direct integrations with Zoho CRM, Bigin by Zoho CRM, and Salesforce. For other CRMs, you can connect them to SalesIQ using Webhooks.

How do I prevent users from dropping off before an agent responds?

Users tend to drop off when wait times are long or there’s no acknowledgment of when an agent will respond. To prevent this, deploy chatbots connected to your knowledge base to engage users while they wait. The bot can identify their issue, provide a solution if possible, or route them to an available agent when needed.