How to Create an Efficient Live Chat Team at Scale (Ep. 8)

Welcome to episode eight of Whiteboard Wednesday. In this episode, Chad Kodary, CEO of DashClicks, discusses creating an efficient live chat at scale.

For absolute beginners, live chat appears like a tiny little bubble either on your website's bottom right or bottom left. When you click on it, you open up a live chat where your team answers questions in the back end. The team in the backend also handles all the incoming tickets.

Benefits of Using Live Chat Software

Live chat is known to increase conversion, speed up sales funnel, improve service quality & customer experience on the website, and reduce response time.

Different software tools enable live chat on websites, such as Intercom, Zendesk, HubSpot, LiveChat, etc. But, in this session, we will explain how to offer excellent customer service and create a live chat experience that helps your business scale.

We'll also discuss how to create an experience so that your customers get immediate help and never leave the live chat session empty-handed.

So, today, we will Whiteboard some cool tips & tricks, and tactics that you can implement to create an efficient live chat system.

We at DashClicks use Intercom for our live chat. So, we'll share our experience while using and improving our live chat system - Intercom. To create a better live chat experience and scale this, you should create triggers.

How to Use a Live Chat Software?

The best way to generate inbound leads is by using live chat triggers.

A. Use Triggers

So, when a visitor (call him Bobby, the painter) comes to our website and spends more than 10 seconds, it is a trigger for our website DashClicks.com, and a live chat option would pop up with a greeting message flashing on it. You can either use an old greeting or ask a question here. The idea is to start a conversation with this visitor.

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You can ask ice breaker questions such as:

• Are you interested in XYZ?
• Hey, what type of industry are you in?
• Hey, what service are you looking for?

You can also set triggers on certain pages. For example, if a specific page that a visitor is on is for a marketing agency and talks about SEO services, you can set a trigger based on how long they’ve been on your website and the page they’re on.

If somebody spends more than 10 seconds on a specific page, such as an SEO service page, you can ask them, “Hey! Are you looking for SEO services?”

‘Yes‘ or ‘no‘? It sets the ground to initiate a conversation.

2. Segment the Conversations

Segment the live inbound conversations that you’re having. Like the IVR, when people open up a live chat, they might have different queries and purposes. So, people may have questions regarding sales, billing or invoices, tech support, etc., when they call software companies. These can be the three major categories people go to live chat for.

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So, when they visit the website, and the little live chat bubble appears, you can use routing. The bots in the live chat software use questions to initiate the trigger and decide the right team to which you can transfer the chat.

Separate buckets are created in the back end to transmit the conversation to the concerned teams. For example, the questions about invoices and billing are transferred to the accounts team, those about technical glitches to the tech support team, and so on.

How to Handle Random or Vague Questions?

Sometimes, people ask general random questions that don't fall into any category. Or maybe the bot is not able to understand their question correctly. Such queries are assigned to a support person in the backend, who probes a little deeper to decide where the query should be routed.

Such queries are generally routed to any of these three categories based on the nature of the questions. This process works very well here at DashClicks where we receive hundreds of tickets every day. We have set up this bucket system with Intercom, the live chat software.

With the bucket system in place, these queries are segmented and sent to the right inboxes. We automatically make routing rules for every inbox and round-robin the tickets to the specific reps.

Pro Tip: If you receive less than ten tickets a day, you don't need this strategy.

How to Scale the Live Chat System?

To scale the live chat system, you need to know the following metrics.

1. Time Taken to Answer

This metric indicates the time taken by the rep to answer the live chat ticket since the time they open the live chat while visiting your website. At DashClicks, our target is to keep it under one minute. It's crucial because nobody wants to wait for more than a minute to get their queries answered, and if it happens, they are very likely to bounce off to another alternative.

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2. Time to Close

It relates to the time taken by the reps to close the ticket. But, it's tricky as in the case of tech support, the representatives may take days or even weeks to close the tickets. Sometimes, there is a billing issue where the reps have to look into the records. If it's a tech support issue, the agents might need assistance from the development team. We don't average out the time taken to close the tickets as we usually respond, and provide answers quickly, to most of the queries. Calculating the average time taken to close the tokens will only increase the standard handling time.

3. Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is a crucial metric, and you should strive to achieve a 90% or above customer satisfaction ratio. Intercom, the live chat software that we use, sends an email to the customers asking them for the customer service ratings. Apart from giving a rating between one to five, customers may also leave a review for the service reps. At DashClicks, we review these ratings every week and ensure that ratings don't fall below 90%.

There are many other metrics too, but these are the three major ones that decide the efficiency of your live chat support.

Final Words

To sum up, the following helps you make sure that you have an efficient live chat system set up:

1. Triggers going out to start conversations
2. Segmented departments for each type of ticket
3. A plan to route to round-robin efficiently so that reps can get equal distribution across tickets
4. Making sure that these metrics are maintained:
5. A good response time, ideally less than a minute
6. A good average time to close a ticket considering both the speed and quality of support
7. Above 90% customer satisfaction ratings

I hope this blog post was helpful in guiding you about scaling your live chat department. Start implementing it right away, and tell us your experience in the comments below.

To read the next blog post based on our weekly Whiteboard Wednesday sessions on YouTube, keep following this space.

Have a fantastic day!