OK—so you’re excited about the possibilities of Live Chat and ready to take your customer support program to the next level. Awesome! But before you jump in with both feet, it’s imperative that you plan first. Here are a few ABCs to help ensure your success.
Analyze your data to determine how many agents you’ll need
Make sure you have enough agents to quickly respond to incoming chat sessions. Part of the beauty of Live Chat is the ability to quickly respond to customers. A long wait time negatively impacts the customer experience. Waiting for more than 15 seconds for an agent to accept the chat will likely fuel the fire for an unhappy customer and, at best, annoy a happy customer who is just using chat for a simple question.
How many agents are enough without having too many? Take a look at your web metrics and phone traffic patterns to make this determination. It may be that you need extra agents only during peak times. Then again, your support team may be so busy that you’ll need a dedicated resource. Whatever the answer is for your business, be sure you track how quickly agents can accept chats and begin a dialog with the customer. Make it a priority to be flexible when it comes to adding Live Chat representatives.
Be ready to invest time and money in training
An ideal scenario is to cross-train customer support agents that work the phones so that they can also handle Live Chat. But don’t assume that a person who is good on the phone is going to be good on chat, or vice-versa. Even with spell-check features and the ability to automate certain parts of chat, don’t allow someone with poor spelling or grammar to represent the face of your company.
Make sure that your Live Chat agents, whether new hires or old hats, have adequate training. Though Tracker’s Live Chat feature is intuitive, give agents a chance to practice and become familiar with the features.
Just as important, agents should understand your products and services, be familiar with policies about warranties, know the escalation process, be comfortable using the knowledge base, know how to attach notes, and how to create support tickets, if necessary.
Cautiously launch your Live Chat
Follow the example set by restaurants and stores that have a soft opening before the grand opening: consider a “break-in†time for your Live Chat deployment. Take the time to get any kinks worked out. Make sure your chat agents are comfortable before taking on chat during times of heavy volume. During the first few weeks, it is particularly valuable to have a manager monitor the chat transcripts.
Do follow up
Fast-forward one month: You’ve launched Live Chat and things seem to be going well. Agents are answering questions, sending downloads to customers, and using transcripts to help analyze issues and improve customer service. Cool. Your agents are happy. Are your customers happy? An easy way to find out is to survey them using the Quick Survey feature in Tracker 8.0. Some possible questions to ask:
- Did we resolve your issue?
- Was your chat agent knowledgeable?
- Would you use chat again?
If you already have the Tracker application from PhaseWare, you can be up and running with Live Chat as soon as you put the infrastructure in place to successfully deploy. Simply follow the ABCs! And if you don’t use Tracker yet, take a minute to sign up for a quick demo and see how easily you can use Live Chat to complement your customer-focused solution.