Meeting the need for customer service speed

• ●  Agent availability

Supervisors or managers can manage the schedules of their live chat agents. You can define work periods and create rotas, to ensure even coverage throughout the day.

• ● Responsive chat button

You can configure your chat button so that it will respond to agent availability. So, if no agents are available, an offline message is displayed to your customers instead of a “Chat now” message. This helps to avoid false promises of ‘live’ help.

• ● Pre-chat survey

Use pre-chat surveys to find out the customer’s name and need. This will help you give personalised, relevant service right away.

• ● Chat routing

Chat routing ensures that the right agents get the right requests. When customers connect to the best agent for their query first time, they get a solution sooner. So, be sure to configure your routing rules carefully – based on skill, time, and availability.

• ● Chat queues

You can use chat queues to both manage customer expectations and manage chat requests more efficiently. For agents, it’s helpful to see how many chats are pending, and which ones need priority. For customers, it’s useful to stay in the loop with relevant queue messages.

• ● Pre-set greetings

Typing out a greeting to each individual customer can be a time sink. So, use pre-populated greetings that take the customer’s name from the pre-chat survey form. That way, you can send a personalised welcome message with a single click.

• ● Chat preview

Chat previews let you see what the customer is typing, before they hit ‘send’. This helps you give pre-emptive service, reaching a resolution quicker. Plus, you can keep an eye on the customer’s typing progress – helping you dip in and out of chats more efficiently.

• ● Concurrent chats

When it comes to dipping in and out of chats, the correct label would be concurrent chat sessions. Unlike a telephone call, handling concurrent chats means that you can deal with more than one customer at once. In turn, your customer service speed builds momentum.

• ● Suggested response

Use suggested responses to reply within a few strokes of the keyboard. Rather than an official, company response, a suggested response is like the predictive text on your phone. Your typed messages are remembered, and the chat software will suggest the most suitable recent response for you to insert. It’s a nifty little time-saver to slash your response times.

• ● Video chat

To eliminate typing altogether, you can also try video chat. Video chat duplicates face to face service through your website, and is one of the quickest and easiest ways to offer fast, friendly service.

• ● Inline assistance

If you don’t know the answer to a customer’s question, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to delay. Instead, you can tag a colleague or manager using the ‘@’ button and get help right within the chat window.

• ● Missed chat

In the unfortunate event that you do miss a chat, you don’t need to let the customer slip through the net altogether. Instead, you can use missed chat handling to reignite the conversation and send an email response to the customer’s missed session.

• ● Sentiment analysis

Use sentiment analysis to find out how happy customers are with your live chat service. Do you need to be quicker? More efficient? Post-chat sentiment analysis will give you insights on how customers think you’re doing.

• ● Chat analytics

To be at your fastest, you need to know peak chat times and trends. So, make sure you use chat analytics to find out when customers are most likely to engage, and man your channel accordingly.