Our story began in 2002
Our Global Locations
GlowTouch in the News
Putting People First
Ensuring Security for You and Your Customers
Our story began in 2002
Our Global Locations
GlowTouch in the News
Putting People First
Ensuring Security for You and Your Customers
Find out how to set up successful live chat support for your business: how live chat works, the best chat software, how to set up operations and the right metrics to measure.
Customer support is crucial to the success of any business. Whether you’re looking to resolve customer issues, delight your customers or retain and sell to more customers, support plays a crucial role. Live chat is one of the most engaging and efficient ways to provide customer support.
In this guide, we cover a range of topics relating to live chat support, from the basics to software options and how to set up a world-class live chat operation that delights your customers.
Live chat is quickly becoming the top customer support channel for many companies. It’s convenient for customers and highly cost-effective and efficient for companies. There are many benefits to implementing a live chat support channel for your customers.
For most companies, your website is the top channel for your brand, and it has many jobs:
Live chat adds a real human element to your site experience, helping you improve engagement with your prospects and customers. Live Chat provides the highest customer satisfaction of any channel.
Chat gives your customers the immediacy and live interaction of a phone call with the relaxed convenience of email. During live chats, customers can multi-task without having to wait hours or days on an email response.
When compared to phone support, live chat will save you money because:
Chat doesn’t require a native accent, only strong written communications, making it easier to outsource worldwide and often save 65% on direct labor costs.
Adding live chat support to your website should be priority number one, especially if you’re a SaaS, subscription, eCommerce or retail business. With live chat at your side, you can speed up the sales process by providing instant answers to prospect questions, reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase the conversion rates on your landing pages and sign-up pages.
In addition, live chat is a perfect platform for up-selling and cross-selling while customers are actively online. And as an outsourced support provider, we’ve directly driven 177% ROI through live chat sales.
Because live chat is a fully digital channel, it provides an opportunity to capture comprehensive visitor tracking and support analytics. Instead of simply providing support, you can gather useful data that helps you improve your business. Actual chat transcripts provide detailed insight into customer behavior.
In general, live chat support of course means engaging in live, written conversations with customers. But you can use live chat in several different ways:
We have all experienced Live Chat in action. When you’re browsing a company’s site to check out their marketing software tool, but you still have some questions. Then, ping.
A friendly support agent starts a chat with you and asks if there’s any questions she can answer for you. You say sure, and you get answers to all of your questions, giving you peace of mind and helping you decide it’s time to sign up for a free trial. That’s proactive chat support in a nutshell — proactively inviting customers to engage in a chat when the time is right.
With strategic thought and analysis of your specific website user behavior and your offers, you can integrate proactive chat in a way that benefits your customers and your business. To get you thinking, here are some use cases for successful proactive chats:
Visitor data allows you to personalize proactive chat invitations, triggering chats either manually by live chat agents or automatically using the software. Key pieces of visitor information can include:
Key Don’ts:
For more, read this piece from Comm 100.
Imagine going to a gift shop and searching for the perfect trinket. You might see a sales associate in the store, available to help. If and when you want help, you’ll seek her out, and the sales associate will help you. That’s reactive support. The key is being there and visible when the customer wants a helping hand.
You’ll need to strategically plan the placement of live chat buttons to maximize convenience for the website visitor, so they can always engage with you when they’re ready. Placing chat buttons and icons in prominent places on your site and apps can also turn would-be phone calls into chats, saving you money as chat is more cost-effective than other channels.
You’ve got a customer who has a problem, and needs help. So she reached out to you for a hand with your product. That’s what most people think of when they picture customer support. Live chat is well-suited to handling any of the traditional types of support, including:
Live Chat is the perfect platform to inform existing customers of your other offers or to ask them if they want more of what they already have. In other words, to upsell or cross-sell to them.
For example, if a visitor is browsing a personal software plan and you offer a team plan that’s better suited for her needs, you may be able to help her and increase your bottom line at the same time.
The best time to cross-sell or upsell customers is after you’ve already resolved their issue. In this approach, agents ask questions during chats to uncover key drivers of a customer’s success and then subtly turn the conversation toward your offers at the appropriate time.
Satisfied customers who’ve just had an issue resolved may be ready to extend or renew their plans. And some may benefit greatly from scheduling a separate consultation with your inside sales team to discuss one of your premium offerings.
Depending on how much sales you want to drive, you can turn your whole support center into a profit center —
The process involves several key steps:
Monitor and coach on selling incorporating sales into your QA process
When a customer is having a technical issue, many times the first place they will go to will be your website. She wants to find the answers and find them quickly. Aside from having a strong online knowledge base, having a technical support agent available to assist will help reinforce the value you place on the customer experience.
Chat is as an effective channel for technical support and may include:
In this section, we introduce the various types of live chat and support software, cover the key features you’d need and give you an overview of the most popular platforms available today.
In general, customer support software is designed to simplify support by giving you an efficient, centralized way to manage your support contacts — both incoming chats and proactive chats you initiate. But there are many, many options available. Depending on the platform(s) you select, you may select software that incorporates automated chats (chat bots), documentation, customer records, canned (pre-scripted) responses agents can use, transcripts from previous chats and other relevant data.
Here’s a brief rundown:
What’s under the hood of these software tools? Here are the different features you might want:
Here’s a look at some of the popular chat and help desk software options available today, and some of the key features they provide (at the time we wrote this article). This is not by any means a comprehensive list.
ZenDesk — team inbox, knowledge base, social, chat, phone, forum
Zoho — CRM, social media, support and much more
Freshdesk — team inbox, social, chat, phone
UserVoice — team inbox, knowledge base, mobile support, forum
Kayako — team inbox, knowledge base, chat, phone
Hubspot — team inbox, knowledge base, chat, phone
HappyFox — team inbox, knowledge base, social, chat, phone, mobile support, forum
LiveAgent — team inbox, knowledge base, chat, social, forum
Reamaze — team inbox, knowledge base, chat, social, mobile support
Deskero — team inbox, knowledge base, social, chat
UserEcho — team inbox, knowledge base, forum, social, chat
Desk — team inbox, knowledge base, social, chat, phone
Intercom — team inbox, chat, social
In this section, we cover the key operational components of a great chat support organization, including:
In the ideal world, everyone would offer 24/7 coverage but for many companies it is not economically feasible or in some cases needed. When setting up your support operation start by examining who is your customer and where do they live. If your business is primarily a regional player supporting businesses that operate during normal business hours, staffing during that time may be all that you need. If your customers are spread across multiple time zones, consider where there is the most crossover and start to build schedules from there.
When to expand hours of operation? Whatever hours of operation you choose, it is important to track volume by interval to identify peak times. This includes tracking volume and activity when support staff is not available. If you begin to expand your footprint across multiple time zones and your product or service become mission critical for the customer, that is when expanded hours of coverage may become a higher priority.
Contact centers strive to provide the best possible support, drive the most sales and build the happiest team with the fewest necessary agents. It’s all about efficiency. At a minimum, you always need two people, so one can cover for the other while they go on breaks. Then, depending on your hours, you’ll need more agents. For example, if you offer 24/7 support, that’s a full three 8-hour shifts. At a minimum of two agents working at any given time, you now need six agents minimum. Depending upon how many contacts you expect during peak service hours, you may need additional staff to achieve the desired service level for customers. Staffing the optimal number of agents can get very complex.
Historical patterns are the best way to predict future patterns, including peaks and valleys during the day. One can use a simple spreadsheet to develop an hourly forecast and by understanding a few key variables begin to estimate staffing needs by half hour.
Erlang C is a traffic modeling formula used in call center scheduling to calculate delays or predict waiting times for callers. Erlang C bases its formula on three factors: the number of reps providing service; the number of callers waiting; and the average amount of time it takes to serve each caller. There are free online calculators that utilize Erlang C that can be used as a starting point for developing schedules. Read more about workforce management basics.
Training is absolutely crucial to a strong support operation. Agents need to become experts in your company, products and policies. They need to have great people skills, exhibit strong communication, be patient and have a desire to serve with empathy.
They need to be able to understand the culture of your customers — this comes into play when outsourcing with an offshore partner. Ensure your partner has strong cultural training programs in place.
For chat support channels, strong written communication is required along with the ability to multi-task. Training should incorporate listening techniques specifically for chat. If you are working with a near shore or offshore partner confirm they have ESL (English as a Second Language Training) in place. There are so many subtle differences in the use of the English language, mastering inferences and analogies takes practice.
The goal of a great knowledge base and documentation is to help your customers help themselves while decreasing the number of unnecessary customer chats and contacts you receive — saving you money. You want to turn your customers from novices into experts on your products.
A knowledge base is a central library of FAQs, tutorials on using your products, login and password recovery steps and simply a collection of useful information on anything and everything that helps your customers use your products.
Use cases:
Best practices:
For more on documentation, check out Zapier’s complete guide on the subject.
In this section, we give you a brief overview of the key metrics to consider when you set up your chat operation. For a deep dive into customer support metrics and how to use them to continuously improve your customer support, see The Ultimate Guide to Customer Support Metrics.
The average length of time customers who start chats wait before being connected with an agent.
Total length of time all customers wait before connecting with an agent/ Total number of calls = Average call wait time
Service level describes the measurable services you provide customers in a given time period — for example you may want 80% of incoming chats to be answered within 60 seconds. Service level is a leading indicator for measuring the customer experience.
The basic formula is
Service Level = total chats answered within threshold/(total chats answered + total chats abandoned) x100
The number of customers who close their chat before being connected with an agent. This is calculated as:
Abandonment Rate = (Number of customers who abandon chats up before connecting with an agent/Total number of chats) X100
The total average duration of a single interaction, including wait time, chat time and the follow-up or related admin tasks.
AHT = (Total talk time + Total hold time + Total post-call work time)/Number of support conversations
Concurrency tells us how many chats agents are handling at the same time.
The customer satisfaction score indicates how satisfied your current customers are with your product or service.
It can be measured a variety of ways, but the most common is a transactional rating after contacting support. You might pose the following question:
“How would you rate your recent experience with our help desk?” with the options: “Bad” or “Good”.
CSAT% = Number of “Good” responses/Total number of surveys received x100
NPS is, broadly speaking, the likelihood your customers would recommend you to people they know.
Ask your customers how likely they are to recommend your product or company to someone else, on a scale of 0-10. Scores between 0-6 are detractors, 7-8 are neutral, and 9-10 are promoters. Calculate your NPS by finding out the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. The higher the NPS the better.
NPS = % promoters – % detractors
(NPS scores are a number between -100 and 100.)
CES measure how much effort your customers have to put in to have their requests handled.
For example, you can ask them “How easy was it to get your issue completely resolved?” Answers could be on a scale of 1-5 or 1-7, ranging from “Very easy” to “Very difficult.” Or, you can ask customers to what degree they agree with the following statement: “You made it easy for me to resolve my challenge” on a scale of 1-5 or 1-7.
Their score (or average score) is your CES. Calculate total CES by finding the average of all your customer scores:
CES= All customer effort scores /Number of customers who responded
This is just a sampling of customer support metrics. For more information on metrics and how to strategically implement the right ones in your operation, we recommend seeing our complete white paper: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Support Metrics.
This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.