The best contact center chat does more than answer questions and resolve concerns. When it’s friendly, helpful, and professional, the customer logs off more satisfied with your business. A positive customer experience with contact center chat can enhance brand loyalty, increase revenue, and bring other benefits. Here are the top strategies to try.
#1 Inform Agents
Make sure that contact center agents have the necessary information at their fingertips. With the right call center software, they can efficiently:
- Search the company knowledge base
- Access customer profile and history
- Identify whether subject matter experts are available for transfer
- Provide the latest offers and detailed information.
#2 Train Agents
Along with providing the best tools to your contact service agents, take the time to effectively onboard these individuals. Provide training on how to:
- Focus on problem-solving
- Listen actively
- Avoid jargon
- Employ scripts effectively
- Defuse conflict politely
- Communicate clearly and honestly
- Recognize limitations and know when to enlist other agents, experts.
Customers enjoy live chat, saying this channel provided a higher level of satisfaction than email or voice, in a Zendesk Benchmark Report.
#3 Be Prompt
An advantage to live chat is the agent’s ability to handle multiple customers simultaneously. Nevertheless, this should not happen at the expense of quality customer service. Part of live chat’s popularity is its expedience. Make sure that your agents are handling only the number of chat sessions that they can manage without sacrificing responsiveness, professionalism.
Additionally, it’s important they these agents stay on topic. Of course, these individuals are human and want to interact with customers in a courteous way, but they want to do this while keeping the conversation moving on track.
#4 Emphasize Transparency
The customer can’t see what the contact center chat agent is doing. Yes, they get the little message telling them the agent is typing or reading, but when it takes “forever” still for the agent to respond, the customer will get frustrated. Encourage agents to:
- Introduce themselves as soon as a chat is added to their queue
- Explain what they will be doing if they are going to take a few minutes
- Check in with customers regularly if an answer is taking a while
- Use automated responses to expedite contact chat
- Stay in contact with the customer, avoiding leaving them waiting in the chat room for something to happen.
Part of this practice of transparency includes avoiding jargon and technical terms, long and uncommon words, or abbreviations the customer may not know.
#5 Personalize Communications
Treating each customer as an individual brings people back to your business. Shortcuts and scripts can help streamline the contact center chat, but if agents rely too heavily on these tools the customer can feel their specific concerns are being ignored. The agent needs to pay attention to customer tone/mood. If they are fielding multiple chats, they may be contending with an angry customer A and a jovial customer B. Mixing these two up and making a joke with A might only exacerbate the problem.
#6 Prioritize
Working with multiple people at once is challenging. Contact center agents in this context need to be able to prioritize customers and actions. Additionally, they need to be encouraged to focus on first-contact resolution. Yes, an amazing average resolution rate is a great statistic to have. However, if your agents aren’t meeting the customers’ needs on first contact, they’ll be dissatisfied. Them reaching out again, perhaps on chat or another channel, is the best case scenario. Otherwise, they may simply take their business elsewhere.
#7 Monitor and measure
Use contact center software to monitor and measure live chat success. Screen recording and measuring performance metrics associated with the handling of customer concerns, sales, upsells, contact duration, customer satisfaction (gauged by post-contact surveys) and more, can help drive optimized performance.
As with any aspect of contact center management, there is always room for improvement. With ongoing effort, your business can stand out from the rest in a competitive marketplace.
