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.
Make sure that contact center agents have the necessary information at their fingertips. With the right call center software, they can efficiently:
Along with providing the best tools to your contact service agents, take the time to effectively onboard these individuals. Provide training on how to:
Customers enjoy live chat, saying this channel provided a higher level of satisfaction than email or voice, in a Zendesk Benchmark Report.
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.
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:
Part of this practice of transparency includes avoiding jargon and technical terms, long and uncommon words, or abbreviations the customer may not know.
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.
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.
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.