subject: Avoiding Pitfalls in Live Chat Support Services [print this page] Providing live chat support services on your website site for sales inquiries and customer support along with traditional email and phone support is a good idea, It is more economical and easy to access any were from the world. Websites which are using chat software has increased its sales volume, lead conversion ratio and customer stratification than site which not using chat system.
Live chat support is easy, multi task oriented and convenient way of customer support system, it was widely accepted as one of the best customer support communication mode along with email and telephone support. Beware of the pitfalls in using live chat support services for your business websites.
Moot live chat has conducted a survey of chat users on different business categories like E-commerce & customer support sites and mainly web hosting support where the experience hasn't been all that positive and lot of chat users got bad customer support experience due to any one the following reason.
Use of Pro active chat
Pro active chat is one of the great feature of live chat software, your operator can invite the visitor for a real time chat session as soon as they entered in your website, most of the website visitors getting irritated if they got chat invitation pop up images immediately. Avoid using Invite Chat feature more frequently, allow the visitors to navigate the pages freely, invite them to chat only when they are stayed in key pages like product prices, product comparison, and check out pages for considerable amount of time.
Never invite the visitors for chat if they already Ignored/Rejected your chat request, because they know that your website provide Online chat services and they can call for Live help when they feel need of your operator assistance.
Avoid Delay in accepting Chat Request
Customer's chat request put on hold in chat queue for long time, Most of the Live Support operators took 5 to 10 minutes to accept the chat request even though system message says that queue length in only 2 or 3 in most of the cases. Also after a long waiting time system redirected to Offline messages to leave a messages and lot of customers got irritated on this action because they feel that it is waste of time.
Request your operator to give more priority for incoming chat request, they may have some important issues. If your live chat software supports pre Chat query option then please enable it and you can estimate the importance of the issues before your operator accept the chat. Your operator has to reduce the Chat queue waiting time as much as possible.
Enable the choose operator feature, so that visitor themselves can decide to whom they want to chat and give them provision to select the department that suit their current problem.
Increase the Operator Chat Response time.
After the chat accepts, Chat support agent taking long time to respond to the customer's query and it is probably they are handling more number of chats concurrently.
Most of the chat system has the option to set the Max chat limit for each operator. Administrator has to set the limit based on the operator's experience, Chat typing speed, Technical knowledge on the business. As per the survey an experienced Chat operator can handle up to 6 to 8 chat concurrently and if they handle more than that then it will lead decrease in response time ratio.
Customer support manager has to audit the chat report and chat Transcript periodically, Also Customer Support manager has to get the detailed after chat survey feedback from the customer to evaluate the Chat response from customer point of view. If any of the customer voted for negative feedback, support manager has to check whey customer voted like that and do the need full action.
If Operators are very busy, just try to update the visitor periodically at least once in 60 Seconds, whenever possible send the apologies messages for the delay, so that customer can feel that Chat operators are working for them.
Misuse of canned messages in chat response:
Use of canned messages will increase average Chat response time, it will be error free. At the same time it has lot of demerits if it was not used properly.
Operators dumping huge text of manual for their query in chat window, hope they are pumping that much of lengthy text from canned messages. Online chat response should be short messages always like twitter, don't send huge reply from canned messages. If it is detailed manual then PUSH the URL to that manual instead of pasting them as chat messages.
Sometimes customers are getting irrelevant chat response messages to their question from the agents. Operator has to double check whether selected canned response has relevant answers to the customers query or not before they send it to customer.
Outsourced live chat operators
Customers are reported that they are seeing lot of grammatical mistakes & spelling errors in the chat responses, even some times they are unable to understand it.
It is common, to cut the operational cost companies are outsourcing live chat services to India and other countries. Giving quality customer support services is more important than Cutting the cost, Loosing one existing customer is more equivalent to getting 10 new customers. So do some detailed study about the outsourcing companies before you are hiring them for customer support.
