Contextual support: Why is it essential to live chat in 2025?

Frustration is the silent killer of user experience. When users encounter issues with your product, it can significantly impact their overall satisfaction. This becomes even more frustrating when users cannot troubleshoot the issue. This sense of helplessness often drives them to abandon the tool.

To battle this, live chat support has become the new standard by offering instant, comprehensive assistance. But what if live chat could provide context-aware guidance? This means you meet users where they are and help them resolve their issues effortlessly.

However, the key question is: how can your support team consistently deliver these contextual customer experiences?

Let’s explore how contextual support transforms live chat into a powerful customer-centric tool and why it’s essential for delivering exceptional experiences.

What is contextual support?

Contextual support refers to a method of resolving customer queries by offering concise information about tasks or situations relevant to their context. Unlike generic FAQs or disconnected help articles, it provides solutions embedded in the user’s workflow, enhancing efficiency and significantly reducing the mounting of support tickets.

Contextual help not only improves users’ learning but also boosts overall user experience by providing the right information at the right time.

Why do users search for contextual help?

For users who typically value simplicity and prefer to resolve issues in the fastest and easiest way possible, knowledge-based findability is a massive hurdle for them. They would rather fire off tickets or connect to customer support than dive through the help manuals.

Even with the strong artificial intelligence in customer support, users’ search for contextual help keeps rising due to convenience and immediacy. Users can conveniently resolve issues without waiting.

For example, consider an in-app contextual help explaining the functions when users hover over a feature or live chat that curates relevant articles and provides step-by-step instructions within the chat. This saves your users from reading lengthy manuals and offering quick and efficient solutions.

How do we create contextual help for users?

To create effective contextual help for users, focus on identifying their pain points, utilizing user analytics to anticipate needs, providing in-app assistance such as tooltips and live chat, incorporating AI-driven solutions for real-time support, and refining the experience through continuous user feedback.

5 easy steps to create contextual support for your users:

• Understanding user pain points: Identify user trouble spots with heatmaps, feedback, or support ticket data to provide contextual help. For example, if many users abandon the onboarding process, prioritize assistance at that stage.
• Incorporating user analytics: Adding it to your SaaS helps you track user actions, spot struggles, and deploy targeted help.
• Embed in-app help: Understand the user’s struggle with your product with insights and create in-app guidance like tooltips, live chat windows, and interactive FAQs.
• Integrate AI: Adding AI, especially to live chat, helps understand the issue’s context and offers instant solutions. It also automates the user’s repetitive queries to provide tailored solutions and save agents time.
• Iterate based on feedback: Continuous improvement is key. Monitor how users interact with contextual help and refine your approach.

How can contextual support be provided to users?

Contextual support can be provided to users by delivering timely, relevant assistance that aligns with their specific needs and actions. By proactively offering guidance based on context and continuously improving through feedback, you can enhance user satisfaction and streamline the overall experience.

1. Tooltips

A tooltip is a small popup that appears when users hover their mouse over a hyperlink or icon. It offers a brief description or additional information about a specific feature that users might find confusing or want to learn more about.

2. Walkthroughs

Walkthroughs are a sequence of tooltips that appear one at a time as a continuous process within the user interface. To give step-by-step instructions to the users from beginning to end on how to complete the tasks.

3. Inline instructions

The most common type of contextual support provided to users is seen when filling out a form. This support typically appears alongside the relevant component of the user interface. It helps users understand the section or provides guidance on how to fill out that specific field.

4. Embedded help

It is an easily accessible help center within the software interface. It contains a comprehensive list of help manuals that can assist users with different aspects of the software. The center also provides tailored article suggestions according to the user’s context.

5. Live chat

Unlike other traditional communication channels such as email and phone, live chat has raised the bar by offering instant responses to customer queries. However, as customer expectations evolve, live chat with contextual support provides context-aware guidance.

Why is contextual support necessary in live chat?

Contextual support in live chat improves customer interactions by offering real-time, personalized guidance for faster resolutions and a smoother experience. By using context-aware insights, it helps agents deliver tailored solutions efficiently, raising the bar for effective customer support.

While the best live chat apps are the staple of modern customer service, live chat with contextual help provides even more personalized guidance based on the users’ context.

1. Contextual support improves the agent’s efficiency

The customer service team tirelessly resolves user queries by asking repetitive questions in a heritage style, which is a time-consuming process. Integrating contextual support can be a game-changer. According to McKinsey, companies implementing contextual support in live chat have reduced query handling time by 40%.

Allowing the support agents to work smarter and quicker by providing all needed actionable insights about user behavior at their fingertips, freeing them to tackle more complex, high-value cases.

2. Contextual support provides a faster solution

One thing every customer hates is the ‘waiting time,’ whether interacting with a human agent or a bot. They prefer to resolve the issue in a brief time rather than answering repetitive questions.

However, integrating contextual support into live chat can significantly change the experience. Where your users can receive context-aware solutions tailored to their inquiries, effectively reducing their waiting time. According to Forbes, more than 60% of people also prefer resolving issues on their own to cease the waiting time before reaching out to a human agent.

3. Contextual support boosts customer satisfaction

Users are likely to return to a business that consistently provides quick, effective solutions. Contextual support in live chat can be a paradigm shift, helping businesses build long-term customer loyalty and boost customer experience.

For example, a user wants to troubleshoot an issue quickly and connects to live chat support. Unlike other live chat applications that offer generic responses, this contextual support live chat provides users with relevant knowledge base articles and summarizes the steps directly in the chat. Allowing them to resolve with minimal effort, which ultimately increases customer satisfaction. Isn’t that great?

This seamless approach is possible via contextual support in live chat.

Where contextual support can be used?

1. Contextual help can be used in self-service support

More and more users are trying to solve issues on their own before reaching out to a support agent. It’s essential to provide them with seamless, on-demand support rather than forcing them to navigate through lengthy FAQs or help documents, which can often lead to frustration.

However, this frustration can be bypassed by self-service software that supports both your website and your app, where you create a safe space so the users can ask questions and get real-time answers without the hassle of endless searching.

2. Contextual help can be used in describing your product

At times, even pro users of your product can struggle to navigate through a new feature or a process. Instead of leaving them to figure it out on their own or reaching out to a support agent, integrating contextual help in the flow would be a game-changer. Where users learn the product and navigate along through the necessary steps in real time, showing them exactly where to click or what to do next

3. Contextual help can be used in the onboarding process

With the increase in new users, you might have an onboarding team, or your website and software may be designed to be intuitive, enabling users to quickly grasp the functionality, next-step process, and purpose of each feature. However, it is still important to have user onboarding on your website or within your app, which provides clear, step-by-step guidance for new users navigating your app for the first time.

This structured introduction can help ease any initial confusion, highlighting the key features and their practical applications, ultimately facilitating a smoother and more engaging user experience.

Best practices for contextual support

Start with core data

Data is always a key to any process. Focus on integrating it as a priority by understanding users’ workflows and pain points to tailor your support to fit them seamlessly.

Keep it simple

Don’t overwhelm your users with too much information; instead, focus on providing clear and concise guidance to meet their needs.

Train your agents

Update your agents whenever you add or update features. This will enable them to leverage contextual information from user interactions effectively.

Adhere to privacy standards

Stringent customer data protection laws must be adhered to while balancing contextual relevance.

Test and refine

The user needs to evolve, and so should your support. Track the key metrics and regularly update your contextual help systems to stay relevant.

Balance tech and human

Always use automation to enhance your performance, but not to replace human personalized interactions.

Meet your customers rising expectations with contextual support

As customer expectations for instant, context-aware guidance grow, contextual support in live chat has emerged as a key differentiator for businesses. It turns routine interactions into meaningful conversations, resolves issues in real time, and fosters stronger customer loyalty while reducing customer churn.

This is where DevRev support excels, in meeting your customers’ expectations by offering a unified system to connect teams to seamlessly escalate queries and deliver real-time contextual assistance by equipping agents with actionable insights.

However, for users looking for a self-service solution, DevRev Turning AI opens a way by curating articles for the user’s queries through semantic keyword searches and also generates new articles for unique customer inquiries. This proactive approach meets your customers’ expectations and helps reduce the ticket load over time.

Ready to improve your live chat with contextual support? Book a demo now.