Live-Chat: Why It Fails & How To Fix It.

Live-chat (real time chat messaging) is now your customers’ preferred contact method. Done well, live-chat drives down costs and pushes sales up.

However – far too many live-chat projects are not done well. Performance is poor, it costs too much, and roll-out is harder than you planned (or the vendors promised). 

So, if you are deploying a new live-chat solution, or trying to fix or expand an existing one; What should you be looking for? How should you understand the problems? And most importantly – what can you do to address them? 

This article covers a number of different areas, with a primary focus on organisational solutions, rather than just technology .

1.      Your Web Team And Operations Folks Must Work Well Together.

Many live-chat solution are primarily led by one or the other, rather than a strong joint effort. This is the biggest potential source of problems. As you will see throughout the article, successful solutions required deep expertise and involvement from both teams.

So before you even start - look at this. Engage your stake-holders, staff up the team from both groups, and if needed, bring in external help who understand both the tech and how a contact center really works.

2.      Deploying Live-Chat Is A Major Organizational Design Problem.

Yes, this is a technology project, but the organizational design is where you will succeed or fail. Common sources of problems include a) allowing your web team to build and manage the agents on their own b) trying to just add a chat channel to every voice channel or c) trying to get your live-chat agents to handle everything that comes to them.

The end-state? A patchwork of poorly designed live-chat teams, answering a wide variety of queries badly. You also don’t have full coverage, so your live-chat agents have to ask customers to call your voice channel, which customers hate.

Instead, your combined web and ops team should.

• Map out the entire contact center operation. The “as-is”
• Design a “to-be” future state, which includes all teams (both live-chat and voice).
• Build a transition plan, how do you get from A to B with minimal disruption.
• Decide which areas are most/least suitable for live-chat.
• Map how different areas interact, so you can minimize live-chat to voice hand-overs.

The goal is to look for large, self-contained and/or related areas, with strong links to web-content or automation. Don't roll out to a new area until you are confident it will work. After you prove can deliver the benefits and have learned more about live-chat, then you should expand.

2.      Treat Live-Chat As An Extension Of Your Website – And Vice Versa

Your customers will be chatting to you at the same time as they are using your website. This creates a huge opportunity. This is not like the voice channel, where the website is just the front door.

“Ah – I see what the problem is – let me show you where to click instead”

Your agents must be able to see what your customers are doing on the website. This can be traditional screen share, more modern co-browsing tools, or the full record of what your customer has clicked.

              “I’m sending you some information that may help.”

Use the website throughout the chat and send links, videos, images etc. If they have a query that can be dealt with on the website, direct them to it, and then give them the support they need. Instead of using text templates, send links instead – it feels more natural.

              “Hey – I see you have a problem making a payment – can I help you with that?”

Reach out to your customers pro-actively as they use the website. Hit them just at the right moment as they are pondering a sale or experienced a problem. Be cautious, as you don't want to annoy your customers with unwanted pop-ups. Knowing when do this is a promising area for machine learning and AI (more on this in another article).

Finally – it is essential that your feedback mechanisms are working. Insight from your agents must reach the website team fast. This can be difficult, especially if your agents are off-shored and/or outsourced.

Build a regular rhythm and feedback process, and staff this with the right expertise covering both web and operations. The improvements to the site will pay for this additional investment.

3.      Operations, Operations, Operations

Managing live-chat agents involved all the challenges of a voice call-center, plus a whole bunch of new problems. It is all about your people in a contact center talking to your customers, and you must get this right.

Even More Reporting

When it comes to reporting and analytics, you will need a) all the same measures as your voice center such as handle time, repeats, customer satisfaction etc b) measures specific to live-chat like concurrent chats and concurrent handle time and c) the ability to track customers between the web, voice and live-chat channel.

This can get expensive and difficult fast, and could require significant integration investment. Do not leave this until too late, or your operations team will be managing in the dark.

Multiple-Sessions For Everything.

Live-chat requires and allows multiple chat-sessions at once. Without this, your costs will be higher, and your agents will be sat waiting for your customers to respond. All your other tools must also allow multiple sessions. I.e. your agents must be able to open multiple customer accounts or place multiple orders at one time. Check if this is possible early in your project.

Workforce Management

Workforce management is different for live-chat. Firstly - you must handle multiple sessions. Secondly, you should be able to redirect volume, or even agents, between the two channels to handle volume peaks. 

Map out and explore your WFM processes early. If possible, you should have a WFM solution that handles both voice and live-chat in the same tool.

Specialize

Hire and train specialist live-chat agents. Don’t just move your voice agents. Recruit for the skills you need, train them with a specialized curriculum, and ensure your management team have the experience and expertise they need.

If you don’t have that expertise internally, then hire it in.

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Deploying live-chat is a must. If you do it well, you will lower your costs, give a better customer experience and sell more… if you do it well…

You must treat this as a major transformation project, one that requires heavy involvement from both your website and operations team. It cannot be an add-on to your website or simply a copy of your voice channel. 

Delivering live-chat well requires a high performing and specialized operations team. They must be equipped with the right tools and analytics to deliver, and their processes, training and recruitment must be tailored to the different demands of live-chat.

Do all of this well, and you will create a new customer experience, an experience that make good use of your website and all the additional capabilities that live-chat offers.

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Jim is a consultant with extensive experience at a senior level in the Philippines, the UK and Australia. He covers a wide range of areas including live-chat, with a special focus on machine learning and data analytics.

If your live-chat solution isn’t working for you, get in touch.