3 Quick-Fire Ways to Get the Most Out of Live Chat

Looking to enhance your live chat channel? Here are 3 ideas that can help.

1. Take Extra Care When Forecasting and Factor in Concurrency

To achieve the potential of live chat, you’ve got to apply the same rigour to forecasting, staffing calculation and scheduling for chat that you apply to all the other channels.

Forecasting the volume of chats is similar to the other channels. However, forecasting average handling time (AHT) for chats requires more care, since multiple chats are in progress concurrently. Make sure that your routing platform reports this correctly.

Finally, when calculating required staffing, you need to factor in concurrency and add an overhead for switching between chats. A good WFM application will make it quick and easy to do just that.

Contributed by: Chris Dealy, WFM Evangelist, injixo

2. Be Sure to Include CSAT Measures in Your Live Chat Channel

To unlock the full potential of live chat in contact centres, agents must receive the proper training to handle queries effectively.

By incorporating CSAT measures into live chat, actionable insights can be gained, leading to improved customer experience and greater efficiency.

Canned responses prove invaluable in handling common queries, ensuring consistent messaging and lightening agent workload.

Integrating AI-powered chatbots takes it a step further, offering personalized 24/7 self-service and allowing agents to focus on more complex issues.

However, maintaining a human touch in this tech-forward landscape is essential in customer interactions.

Contributed by: Ben Booth, CEO, MaxContact

3. Reduce the Need for Agents to Search for Information

Elizabeth Tobey at NICE — Elizabeth Tobey

Live chat should be as seamless if not more so than a telephone conversation, whether it is agent-assisted or unassisted.

Customers want answers quickly and therefore organizations can’t afford to skimp on this in-demand channel.

When an organization is using an agent, this requires a robust AI-powered knowledge management system.

AI has vastly improved knowledge management, eliminating the need to search for information, making interactions like live chat much more efficient.

Furthermore, organizations utilizing bots need to make sure the bots are intelligent and trained on relevant business data with proper guardrails in place around brand language, ensuring that responses to customers are accurate and relevant.

Contributed by: Elizabeth Tobey, Head of Marketing Digital Solutions, NICE

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