Modern businesses cannot imagine their workflow without live chat software on their websites. Live chat software makes it possible to answer customers’ questions in real-time and do this very quickly and professionally. At the same time, live chat agents can manage multiple chats and assist several customers concurrently. Does this reduce the customer service quality level? Let’s try to answer this question in this blog post.
Why managing multiple chats can be a challenge?
Sometimes live chat agents must handle several chats at once. This can happen due to technical issues that the service provider encounters, increased seasonal demand, or improperly organized live chat agents’ shift schedules. When our customers ask us how many concurrent chats will be ok for their agents, we cannot give a definite answer because this depends on various factors, such as:
- Skills of live chat agents
- Complexity of issues live chat agents handle
- Live chat software
Live chat agents should possess such skills as blind typing, excellent knowledge of the products or services they assist with, and the ability to solve problems. At the same time, live chat software should be both reliable and allow agents to collaborate and invite co-workers to assist with complicated issues. Lack of collaboration significantly slows down the speed of customers’ issues resolution.
For fast and smooth assistance live chat agents need to have the following live chat features:
What are the main problems of managing multiple chats?
While managing multiple chats your team can deal with various challenges, such as:
- Slow response. While handling multiple chats, agents need to respond to several customers, investigate different issues, and even consult with co-workers. The speed of responses in such situations depends not only on the typing skills of the agent but also on the level of expertise and complexity of the issue.
- Mixed-up conversations. Switching between customers may lead to confusion as agents may post responses to the wrong chat conversation leaving customers dumbfounded.
- Reduced support quality. Juggling through many chats makes it harder to personalize responses, but easier to lose track of the conversation and details.
Best tips and tricks for handling multiple customers at once
No business can thrive without multitasking today. Everyone aims to increase the number of visitors on a website, and this will result in dealing with more questions and providing more support. Thus, live chat executives should train their skills in managing multiple chats. Here are a couple of tips to handle multiple chats based on the experience of our customer service team:
- Use canned responses. Predefined responses or quick replies help to increase the speed of response. These can be answers to the most frequently asked questions, useful links, or phrases. Live chat agents can paste such responses to their chats, use links or phrases from them while composing their answers.
- Include a link to your knowledge base to your system messages. System messages appear automatically when a chat is directed to an agent and accepted. You can include there some useful information such as a link to your knowledge base or details about your promo.
- Keep chat summary at your fingertips. In Provide Support live chat agent app information about visitors and chat summaries are displayed on the right panel next to the chat area, just at the agent’s fingertips.
- Try not to take more chats than you can handle. To maintain the quality of the conversation we do not recommend handling more than four chats at once. However, depending on the skills and complexity of the issue, agents can handle up to seven chats without any negative impact on quality and speed.
- Don’t forget about the personalized approach. Though the response speed is important, modern customers also expect a certain level of personalization. Thus, it is important to treat every live chat conversation as a face-to-face meeting. With the help of live chat tools such as pre-chat surveys, passing information about customers to the agent’s app, and chat window customization, you can make every interaction experience memorable and pleasant.
- Auto chat accept and close. To save time on managing chats, it is possible to activate the automated chat accept feature and inactive chat rooms closing. This way, if chats are routed to your agents based on load, they will be accepted automatically, and a greeting message will be displayed. Inactive chat rooms where visitors have left the conversation will be closed automatically.
- Teamwork. It is vital to collaborate with your team and have the ability to invite agents to chat. This may be necessary if you need to invite an agent from another department or require the assistance of a more experienced co-worker. With a click, you can invite your co-worker or the manager who monitors chats can easily take over the conversation and assist further.
- Keep track of missed chats. Missed chats happen, because live chat executives are humans. In your Provide Support live chat account, you can specify a separate email address where missed chats will be sent so that agents can handle them later.
- Analyze chat volume and have more agents working during busy hours. With the help of agents’ stats, it is possible to see details about chat load and distribute the workload evenly to cover the busiest shifts with more live chat agents.
With the help of technology and the right live chat tools, agents can successfully multitask and maintain high-quality customer interactions. However, it is necessary to develop the right strategy for your team, ensure that all processes run smoothly, and your agents have access to all available tools that can streamline their performance and allow managing multiple chats.
Olga is a Head of Customer Service Advocates and Social Media Coordinator at Provide Support, LLC. She is a writer and blogger on customer service innovation, customer service excellence and customer support technology.