Installing a live chat tool on your website is a small step towards providing good service to your customers. But it can become a real disaster if you forget about the main part of good service – staff training. Read more on Website Live Chat Support and whether it can beneficial or disastrous to your business site.
CCM Benchmark, a marketing research company, carried out a survey on how live chat was perceived by e-Commerce and customer service decision makers. One of important results was the role that teams play in delivering customer service via live chat. Respondents mentioned importance of the solution adoption by teams and the general process of agents getting used to using the tool. They insisted that if the live chat agents were not involved in the project and trained to use the tool, the project could become counterproductive.
Training is the main step to effective live chat service. But before think of motivation that your chat agents have. Some big companies believe that position of a chat agent should be earned, the agent should really want to get that position to provide great service. For example, Dell agents never start in chat support, even if they had previous chat experience before being hired. Instead, they must first prove themselves as a top performer in traditional phone support, and then “graduate” to earning a spot on the chat support team. The chat agent role is less stressful and therefore more preferable. Zappos, another company recognized for its overall support savvy, also requires agents to “earn” their right to move to chat as a way to motivate its team.
When you are done with motivation make sure that the new agents learn how to use your chat tool. They should be able to easily do the following:
- Read information on real-time traffic monitor and understand where a visitor came from and what he might be looking for.
- Check additional information about the visitor, find previous chat history.
- Initiate a proactive chat.
- Quickly and correctly search for pre-written replies. Be able to adjust them to current situation.
- Transfer a chat to another agent.
- Run simultaneous chats.
Another part of training is service culture.This includes a wide variety of rules about what is aloud pr not during a chat session.
- Spelling culture and typing speed.
- Using formal and informal speech, jargon and professional terms.
- Area of competence of each agent, cases that require transferring chat to another agent and rules for escalation.
- Scripts for standard cases and possible unique situations.
- Goals for every type of chat requests.
The last but not least is product knowledge. All the above training is useless if an agent does not know the product. Make sure that your agents are always informed about the latest changes, updates, new services or products, that they understand them and can correctly describe or explain them to customers.
Website Live Chat Support and Well-trained staff is the key of great customer service, and HelpOnClick live chat software helps to deliver that service to your customers.