There’s always room for improvement, or so they say.
In the call centre, finding ways to improve performance is an ongoing endeavour. Naturally, you want to get the most out of your contact channels — and your team — as you possibly can.
The ways you can do this vary from channel to channel, team to team.
Here, we take a look at how to improve call centre performance across your live chat channel. We’ll cover both how live chat software can help you, and how you can best unlock the performance of the chat channel.
Call centre performance
Before anything, ask yourself:
“What does great call centre performance look like?”
It’s not possible to improve your call centre performance if you don’t know the specifics of what you’re aiming for. So, consider what metrics you look at. For example:
- • Call handling time
- • Response time/ queue time
- • First contact resolution
- • Occupancy
- • Post interaction work time
- • Customer satisfaction/experience
Essentially, you’re looking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the call centre.
With that in mind, it’s time to see how your live chat channel factors in.
Reduced times
One of the core ways to improve call centre performance is to reduce waiting times. Live chat software offers a ‘live’ promise — and that means low wait times are the expected norm.
One of the ways you can improve call centre performance, then, is by embracing this live promise. Live chat software keeps your queue times clear to see. Routing makes sure that the best agents in the call centre get the appropriate chats. And there’s also the potential to integrate a chatbot as a buffer to keeps queue times feeling short, even when your agents are busy.
Live chat software is a great channel to keep wait times low even during busy periods, thanks to the fact that it supports concurrency. Concurrency means that your agents are able to help more people at once (though we recommend no more than 3 maximum chats at a time).
This also translates to higher, more efficient occupancy.
Agent empowerment
Another way to improve call centre performance across your live chat channel focuses on the improvement of the experience your agents create. How? By ensuring a good level of agent empowerment.
Agent empowerment and improved customer service go hand-in-hand. It gives agents the power and authority to make service decisions and meet customer needs in real-time. And they can do so without having to stop the live chat session, get permission, or interrupt the service in any way.
Live chat agent empowerment also makes a higher rate of first contact resolution more likely. Your agents can solve the problem or compensate for issues without jumping through hoops and navigating red tape.
Agent monitoring
Improving call centre performance across your chat channel is much easier to do and to see when you can measure it.
Agent monitoring features help you measure and keep track of all your key chat-related metrics. For instance, agent activity logs allow you to see things like time spent in (and out of) chat sessions. Then there are performance-based metrics like sentiment scores and chat ratings. Then there are metrics to track productivity, such as missed chat reports and chat queue reports. And so on.
When you can see how well your agents are performing, you can see how well your live chat channel is boosting your call centre performance.
Call centre performance and live chat
As call centres grow more and more omnichannel in their service offering, more and more new ways to improve call centre performance will present themselves. Effective use of your live chat channel is a great start.
And fortunately, live chat comes complete with a suite of features that support efficient performance and high-quality support.
Interested in exploring the performance enhancing abilities of live chat further? Why not give WhosOn a try, with a 30-day free-trial?
Useful links
Every contact centre chat deployment needs skills-based routing
The rise of the call centre chatbot
Call centre occupancy and how it applies to your chat channel