Don't take us wrong. We are sure that your customer support agents are good enough to give a qualified and polite answer to any question about your product or service. We are sure they don't have any trouble understanding the customer's intentions. However, even a great support team faces challenges. In this article, we'll explain how to help your live chat agents deal with scheduling issues, high workload, and aggressive visitors.
Table of Contents
Scheduling
Today, when people choose to contact a support agent via a live chat rather than by phone, they expect to receive an answer right away, even if it's nighttime. However, providing 24/7/365 customer support is a luxury available only to huge companies with unlimited resources. Small businesses can't afford growing human teams and hence they should make use of technical solutions to make their leads and customers happy.
The best option is to combine a chatbot with a live chat. Let the chatbot answer simple daily questions and pass the customer to a human agent only when the issue is too complex.
Another way is to use a fallback option. When a chatbot is not qualified enough to solve a customer's problem, and the live agent doesn't pick up the chat in a timely fashion, the visitor can leave a message to be returned by email. This option must ask specific questions to help the support people answer the issue.
For example, if you run an online store, it may be such data as account number, sales order number, date of purchase, and so on.
High Workload
Once you implement live chat customer support, you will notice that people are more likely to resolve issues there than over the phone. Simply because they don't want to be on hold, or they have phone anxiety, or for some other reason. It means that you will probably face an influx of requests, and the more customers you have, the more calls to customer support will be.
As the workload of each member of your team increases, such problems will come: handling multiple conversations simultaneously and slow response times. So, how to unload your agents?
When a live agent has to get a bunch of information from the user, they should be able to pass the customer to a bot to handle and solve the issue.
For example, a customer wants to know your return policy. In this case, a live chat agent can pass them to a chatbot that will get the necessary details for return — an order number, an email address associated with your purchase, and a brief description of the issue with the product.
Canned responses are very powerful to save the live agent time in replying to common questions. These are pre-written replies that allow customer support agents to respond just in one click. They are particularly useful for handling routine inquiries, such as business hours, return and refund policies, shipping, and delivery information, and so on.
Over-reliance on canned responses may make the conversation feel impersonal and robotic, so your agents must keep in mind that personalized assistance should be in the first place.
To help your support team be more effective, use the routing by skills feature in your chat system. It allows you to classify a live agent by skill level or language, and have the chatbot route the incoming chat to the properly skilled person after a couple of qualifying questions.
Thus you will unload highly skilled agents from solving routine issues and make it easier to satisfy customers with peculiar needs.
You may even consider setting up a support team with each member having a specific area of responsibility: let Steve deal with payment and delivery issues, John answer technical questions about your product, and Julia be responsible for promotions. Nice, huh?
Aggressive Visitors
You have to accept a simple truth: even if you have a dream support team, you will meet visitors from hell. Sometimes disrespectful, sometimes utterly aggressive — hiding behind the screen and feeling empowered to act however they want, those guys can bring even the calmest agents to a nervous breakdown. How to deal with them?
Well, that's a piece of cake: just ban them!
However, if you want to improve your customer support service and ensure that your team performs great providing a good customer experience, have a review of the chat experience, and implement a post-chat survey. Let your visitors tell you when they have had a great experience or a poor one. This helps you manage the live agents.
Conclusion
Now, you may wonder, what chat software allows you to do all those things you've just read about? How to:
- Combine a chatbot with a live chatbot to pass a visitor here and there
- Set up a fallback interaction to let a visitor send their request by email
- Enable support agents to use canned responses
- Classify your support agents by skills and route visitors accordingly
- Allow your patient agents to ban bad guys
Here's the solution: TruVISIBILITY's Chat application — a part and parcel of TruVISIBILITY All-in-One Digital Marketing Suite. Here you can not only set up a live chat for your website or other channel but also build chatbots — from simple rule-based to complex AI-powered.
Register a freemium TruVISIBILITY account and get unlimited access to fully functional marketing software free of cost!
As your business grows, you only pay for what you use without any contract. A freemium TruVISIBILITY account allows you to:
- Create a chatbot that can conduct up to 100 conversations per month
- Launch email blasts, start drip campaign, etc with 1000 free emails sent monthly
- Send 1000 SMS texts per month
- Build 1 website including a blog
- 1 GB of storage usage
- 1 SSL certificate
- Unlimited API usage
The pricing is based on usage over the free monthly allotment. Thus it is extremely affordable for small to medium businesses. You can adjust the number of conversations your chatbots can have, the number of emails and SMS that can be sent per month, the number of websites you can deploy, and the capacity of your cloud storage. Simple and flexible!
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