Key Takeaways
85% of customers expect live chat when visiting a website.
While AI chatbots answer basic queries, live chat virtual assistants can handle complex customer issues and connect with them on an emotional level.
Chat support virtual assistants can help with cross-selling and upselling by suggesting product upgrades or add-ons to buyers.
When it comes to communication, every customer has their own preferences.
Some prefer explaining issues over the phone, while others find it easier to shoot an email. Many favor live chat for its convenience and instant issue resolutions.
To meet these diverse needs, your business must provide multiple ways to connect. This not only makes your brand more accessible but also helps you build a customer-first reputation.
However, managing thousands of inquiries from different channels every day is a daunting duty. It also distracts you from core responsibilities.
That’s why you need a virtual assistant for live chat support!
Virtual assistants (VAs) are remote workers who handle routine, time-consuming tasks for your business.
They can manage customer queries via live chat, keeping your brand responsive and reliable.
Why Do You Need Live Chat Virtual Assistants?
Live chat lets customers simply visit your website and get instant help without the hassles of calling or emailing.
Chat support virtual assistants can quickly resolve basic issues such as login errors, payment problems, shipment tracking and password resets within minutes.
They can also assist first-time web visitors who ask about your product, features or shipping policies. This way, potential buyers learn more about your company. You may even gain a new lead!
Many businesses these days provide AI chatbots so customers can get instant responses. According to Deloitte’s global customer service report, these bots significantly improve resolution times.
But even if AI can reply in seconds, it cannot understand complex issues or calm down angry customers.
After all, empathy, patience and emotional intelligence are skills only your human agents have!
How Virtual Chat Representatives Beat Chatbots
Customer service chatbots are designed to provide predefined responses to specific customer requests. If someone requests a tracking link, the bot will share it. If they ask when their order will be delivered, it’ll give a standard response.
These interactions offer speed and efficiency but lack genuine connection. They prevent customers from getting into the whys and hows of their problems.
Plus, since chatbots rely on scripted responses, they often repeat the same answer again and again, even if the customer’s concern is unresolved. This frustrates buyers and increases your ticket volume.
You can avoid these issues by hiring a virtual assistant for chat support.
They resolve problems while guiding users through the solution. Customers get to learn standard troubleshooting techniques, reducing future complaints and improving satisfaction.
Since virtual chat representatives aren’t restricted by scripts, they can engage in meaningful conversations with your customers to build trust.
The next table highlights more differences between virtual assistants and chatbots.
| Virtual Assistants | Chatbots |
|---|---|
| Humans who provide personalized support. | AI agents that rely on a script for client interactions. |
| Reply fast in a clear, empathetic tone. | Respond instantly but lack emotional intelligence. |
| Resolve complex queries and handle complicated tasks. | Handle simple queries and complete basic tasks. |
| Manage responsibilities with minimal supervision. | Require frequent monitoring and troubleshooting to overcome technical issues. |
| Build trust with customers through helpful and engaging conversations. | Frustrate customers with scripted, repetitive responses. |
Chat Support Tasks Handled by Virtual Assistants
Virtual assistants handle chat support tasks using online tools like Zendesk or LiveChat.
They can address customer queries and complaints over text messages. You can also ask them to upsell or cross-sell your products.
Handling Client Queries
Virtual chat representatives respond to all inquiries with useful information in a clear language. They can share product details, pricing and buying steps with interested clients.
By guiding leads throughout the purchasing process, VAs improve customers’ first experience with your company.
They can also suggest additional products based on current items in a customer’s cart, such as an upgraded, higher-priced version or a complementary item. By incorporating upselling and cross-selling strategies, VAs help increase sales.
For example, when a user adds a smartphone to their cart, a chat support virtual assistant can recommend a phone case to them. This will persuade shoppers to purchase more products, resulting in higher profits for you.
Managing Support Tickets
A ticketing system is a feature included in helpdesk tools like Jira and Zendesk that catalogs customer service requests. Tickets are unique case IDs assigned to each customer.
Virtual chat representatives can sort and resolve tickets by priority.
For example, when a client reports a technical issue with your product via email, a ticket is added to the helpdesk system. It includes details about the client’s name, contact and a description of the issue.
To resolve the problem, your VA can share a troubleshooting guide with the inquirer. VAs also forward more complicated issues to your technical support teams for quick resolution.
This ticket-based customer service saves time, as your VA doesn’t have to switch between multiple inquiry channels. They use this saved time to handle priority requests from high-value clients.
Resolving Customer Complaints
A study published by the Baltic Journal of Economic Studies underscores what you already know—fast and reliable support increases customer satisfaction.
The paper highlights two ways to improve customer experience:
- Resolving issues during chat interactions whenever possible.
- Combining chatbots and live chat representatives to meet customer needs.
Chat professional virtual assistants help you achieve these goals! They can learn all the intricacies of your products, services, company policies and brand values and use this knowledge to help customers via live chat.
VAs can also step in when chatbots are unable to solve a problem.
They remain patient and communicate professionally while resolving intricate issues. They listen actively, fully understand the problem before offering solutions, apologize for any inconvenience and explain each troubleshooting step in great detail to assist your customers.
Providing Technical Support
Customers who lack technological knowledge often require personalized support. A survey highlights that 75% of consumers prefer talking to a human for customer service.
And contrary to popular belief, it’s not only the older generation that needs basic technical support.
Many young people are struggling with simple tasks, such as managing Windows and saving files. This decline in digital literacy has increased the workload of customer support teams.
Chat professional virtual assistants can handle queries about app installation, device compatibility errors or software glitches. They can get the required info from your core team to resolve issues or transfer complex tickets to seniors. Other specialized professionals, like virtual IT assistants, can help you meet this demand. They can explain technical jargon in simple terms and provide step-by-step instructions to help customers resolve issues.
You can also hire technical writer virtual assistants to create informative product guides and repair manuals. They describe product features and troubleshooting techniques using bullet points for easy learning and fast execution.
By hiring these technical virtual assistants, you can resolve all complex issues accurately and quickly!
Compiling Customer Feedback
Collecting and analyzing feedback is essential for improving customer support strategies. It helps you identify repetitive issues and understand customers’ pain points during support interactions.
Chat support virtual assistants compile, organize and analyze customer feedback via:
- Collecting customer information (name, contact and problem description) from support tickets and storing them in your CRM system.
- Recording live chat conversations into Word documents or helpdesk tools.
- Labeling each interaction with a relevant title, such as ‘email issue,’ ‘refund request,’ ‘network problem’ and so on.
- Sending feedback forms to customers after their issues are resolved.
- Organizing received feedback into specific categories, such as ‘excellent,’ ‘satisfactory’ and ‘unhelpful’ in CRM and helpdesk tools.
- Reviewing customer feedback to find recurring issues, such as slow response time.
- Analyzing support tickets to identify repetitive problems, e.g., an increasing number of complaints about a specific product feature.
- Attaching relevant information based on previous tickets and feedback to each customer’s profile in the CRM for future reference.
- Summarizing key metrics (tickets generated and resolved per month, positive and negative feedback per month) to create customer satisfaction reports.
By gathering customer feedback, virtual assistants ensure your team has all the essential information needed to resolve complaints more efficiently and increase customer satisfaction.
Organizing Lead Data
Dedicated virtual assistants can create and maintain a lead database for you.
For your business to grow, it needs to have a constant stream of leads. That way, when clients drop off, they are replaced.
Jodie Cook, founder of Coachvox
Enquiries turn to sales calls and signups, meaning more revenue and profit for you and your team.
Live chat virtual assistants can compile lead data (names, contacts and product of interest) from queries received via multiple channels. They organize these details into spreadsheets or CRM databases for fast access.
But accuracy is as important as speed when managing leads. For precise lead data management, virtual assistants can:
- Correct misspellings and inaccurate numbers.
- Identify and delete or merge duplicate entries.
- Fill in missing information, such as the country code for phone numbers.
- Format dates uniformly (MM/DD/YYYY) for faster data filtering and retrieval.
- Tag leads as ‘cold,’ ‘warm’ or ‘hot’ based on their level of interest.
- Regularly update lead databases with the latest information.
Having accurate, accessible and reliable lead data can help you improve conversion rates and increase revenue.
Benefits of Hiring Virtual Assistants for Chat Support
Hiring virtual assistants benefits businesses financially. They save you time and energy, enabling you to prioritize revenue-generating tasks.
But above all, virtual chat representatives enhance customer experiences through clear and calm conversations. They connect with your customers, earning their trust and making them feel heard, valued and cared for.
Save Time
Handling live chat is surprisingly time-consuming.
On average, a single customer service agent handles 84 chats per day and spends nearly 12 hours actively chatting with customers.
Imagine managing that kind of workload alone!
If you’re getting flooded with inquiries and complaints every day, a virtual chat professional can keep you afloat and save you hours of repetitive work.
You can use this time to take a break, prepare for shareholder meetings or brainstorm new business strategies. Even better—you can finally spend some quality time with friends and family!
Reduce Expenses
As virtual assistants work remotely, they don’t need office space, equipment or utilities. This reduces infrastructure and overhead costs, which you can reinvest in new projects.
Hiring overseas VAs via a virtual assistant agency can further reduce employment expenses.
Reliable VA agencies like Zenius help you hire live chat virtual assistants at affordable rates. They also cover salaries, benefits and bonuses for your VAs, increasing your savings!
Enhance Customer Experience
Providing fast solutions to customers is easier said than done. You must stay focused, enthusiastic and organized even when there’s a long queue of tickets.
Virtual chat representatives excel at this.
They assess new complaints and type at a speed of 40+ WPM to resolve issues quickly. For complex problems, VAs provide personalized support, which takes more time but prioritizes customer satisfaction.
So many of the live chats want to categorize problems into a specific area and give them a standardized approach.
Baruch Labunski, CEO of Rank Secure
Customers smell that a mile away and feel like it’s them being brushed off. Every case is different, even though some have the same problem.
Each customer needs to be treated as a unique case and have their chat be personalized.
Empathetic and patient VAs help customers throughout their purchase journey.
Happy customers buy more products, tell their friends about your services and give you a shoutout on social media. This organic reach boosts your brand awareness and reputation!
Boost Revenue
Chat support virtual assistants can help grow your revenue via upselling and cross-selling strategies.
By adopting live chat, popular beauty brand Sephora increased average order value by 25% and boosted customer satisfaction by 20%!
When customers ask about a product, your VA can recommend additional or alternative items and explain the benefits of purchasing them.
For example:
Imagine a customer contacts you to learn more about a clothing item. Your VA shares complete product information and also offers better-quality, higher-priced alternatives, highlighting the perks of increasing their order value (discount, free shipping).
If the customer selects a more expensive product, you make more profits. And if they stick to their first choice, your VA can suggest matching shoes or accessories, helping you sell more.
Gain Specialized Support
Live chat virtual assistants boost productivity while costing far less than in-house employees.
This cost-efficient recruitment increases your return on employee investment while adding valuable skills to your customer support team.
By hiring full-time virtual assistants from the global talent pool, you can access diverse industry knowledge and unique perspectives. Their creative problem-solving capabilities can improve consumer experiences, strengthen your brand reputation and help you retain more customers.
What Skills Should a Live Chat Virtual Assistant Have?
Since virtual assistants work remotely, they need strong communication and collaboration skills. Thankfully, most VAs already know how to communicate professionally in English and collaborate smoothly using online tools.
For virtual representatives, interpersonal skills are also non-negotiable.
As a customer-facing professional, they should be attentive, organized, time-efficient, empathetic and adaptable.
These essential qualities enable live chat VAs to offer practical support, resolve customer concerns and ensure satisfaction.
How To Hire Affordable Virtual Assistants for Live Chat
You can find chat support virtual assistants on job platforms like LinkedIn or Glassdoor. But to hire them, you’ll have to waste weeks shortlisting, screening and negotiating salaries.
Want to avoid hiring hassles? Follow these steps:
- Identify the chat support tasks you want to delegate. These can include answering basic queries, guiding customers through purchases, cross-selling and upselling, collecting lead data and more.
- Decide how much you want to spend on a live chat virtual assistant. Your budget must fairly reflect the volume of tasks you want them to handle.
- Outline your daily expectations, budget, minimum experience requirements and preferred skills. Go into as much detail as possible, as this will help you find the most suitable chat professional VAs.
- Contact a trusted virtual assistant agency such as Zenius. Check if their pricing, features and replacement policies align with your needs.
- Review the candidate profiles yourself. Interview virtual assistants and conduct assessments to evaluate them.
- Finalize a qualified candidate or hire multiple VAs to build a virtual team for live chat support.
- Onboard your new virtual assistant by informing them about your company and industry, key performance indicators, live chat guidelines and refund and return policies.
- Grant your VA access to relevant tools, such as helpdesk systems, CRM databases and email accounts and start delegating tasks!
By following these steps, you can hire a talented virtual chat representative in no time!
How Is Live Chat Changing in 2025?
Modern consumers are impatient. They value their time and expect businesses to do the same. No one is willing to write long emails or wait on hold on calls anymore.
85% of customers expect live chat for instant help when visiting a website. 63% of businesses are already meeting this demand, with more expected to follow suit.
The live chat software market, currently valued at $1.21 billion, is forecasted to reach $1.78 billion by 2030, highlighting a CAGR of 8.03%.
Wondering how to keep up with these evolving customer needs? Here’s what you need to know.
Live Chat Agents As Product Specialists
Chatbots have made customer service faster and more efficient, with 85% of businesses now leveraging generative AI for support.
This isn’t making human agents obsolete but simply changing their role from generic support providers to specialists. In fact, 95% of customer service leaders plan to retain human agents to preserve the essential human touch.
With AI agents automating basic queries, today’s customer service representatives are expected to bring industry expertise and offer in-depth answers about products and services.
Using their understanding of market trends and customer pain points, they can guide users through intricate product features, explain technical jargon and assist with advanced troubleshooting.
Industries like e-commerce, IT, hospitality and pharmaceuticals can benefit the most from hiring specialist live chat agents.
- 63% of online shoppers are happier when they get instant shopping assistance.
- 56% of travelers use live chat on booking portals for travel advice.
- 57% of users contact IT businesses for troubleshooting via live chat.
- 64% of pharmaceutical firms use live chat to help patients with their prescriptions.
A live chat virtual assistant with deep knowledge of your industry, product and customers can offer high-level, personalized support to step up your customer service game.
Omnichannel Live Chat Strategy
Today’s businesses aren’t using just websites to connect with their audience.
If your customers are active on social media, email, mobile apps or SMS, consider integrating live chat on all of them.
Since 50% of users access live chat from their phones, it’s crucial to optimize the experience for mobile, not just desktop.
Omnichannel live chat also lets customers switch seamlessly between channels without losing the conversation or needing to repeat themselves.
It’s easier on your agents, too! They can review past interactions, gain a complete view of the issue and resolve problems faster.
The adoption of omnichannel messaging has increased by 61% recently, with businesses seeing over a 50% boost in both user engagement and customer satisfaction.
A chat professional virtual assistant can manage your unified inbox, take over complex issues from chatbots and create a smooth, helpful experience for customers across every channel.
Final Thoughts
By providing live chat support, you increase the scope of customer service. This enhances customer satisfaction and boosts retention.
As seen in Sephora’s case, effective chat support can even lead to more sales and higher profits.
Virtual chat representatives help you manage high-volume queries and complaints effectively, ensuring no customer feels ignored or undervalued.
Delegating live chat tasks to VAs also lets you find more time and energy for productive, strategic duties.