The ever-expanding sphere of digital/online services means more and more online visitors are interacting with support agents via live chats. These chat requests could be related to getting more information about your services/ products or specifically related to feedback or complaints about the same. For all such queries, your customers are mostly interacting with you either through live agents or through virtual agents over live chats using various programs such as Cisco live chat. It may happen that at times your support agents could be handling too many chat sessions that may result in delays while responding to the customers. Furthermore, all of this could be very exhaustive on the part of contact agents as well. Therefore, managing a large volume of live chat is a challenge for many organizations, especially in the contact center industry.
Whatever is the scenario, you surely do not want your support agents to get bogged down with the volume of chat requests they receive, especially when they may not be trained to manage it all. Still, you pretty much want to ensure that your customers should reach you without wait time, delay, and also get quick and satisfactory responses for their queries. Any organization needs to serve its most-valued clients without delay, and it is indeed urgent when customers are seeking responses to their queries related to your offerings. Organizations should know how to manage a large volume of customers’ queries using options such as Cisco live enterprise chat that can be integrated with your system.
So, what are some of the ways by which an organization can ensure that it is able to effectively manage large volumes of chat requests, yet have highly satisfying chat sessions with its customers?
Below are some of the best practices that can be adopted to ensure that you get to most of your chat sessions with your customers:
Taking stock of things
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It is not like that your support agents are always inundated with live chat requests from your customers. Of course, there are peak scenarios as well as there are times when support agents have not much to do in terms of interacting with your customers. Knowing these peaks and troughs is necessary to address the issue and streamline your operations or resources to meet the stated objectives. But to get the most out of any such analysis, you may want to have access to a sound reporting or analytical tool that can help you get a comprehensive view of the issue. Any analytical tool that can tell you about the reports related to chat volume, including chats accepted, missed, or refused by agents, and about the time of the day when chats attain peak volume will help you plan your resources effectively.
Other reports that can help you get a clear picture of live chats include an analysis of the time spent on the part of agents on chat against available hours to allocate resources accordingly and manage the peak scenarios effectively; and which are the chats initiated by visitors, agents or through auto-invitations so that you know where you need to focus more to reduce the overall chat volume.
Verification
Not all chats are initiated with a clearly stated out purpose. Verifying chats at the very onset will help you segregate the chats that are bogus and merely spams from those that are important.
Here banning visitors that you have previously verified as spam will help you limit such spam chats troubling you the next time.
By having a visitor SSO (Single sign-on) mechanism provided with your live chat software, you can limit access to only those visitors who are logged in. The rest of the visitors can be asked to fill out a pre-chat survey before they can be diverted to the live agent. This mechanism will help you manage even a large volume of requests effectively.
Scheduling
Some chats are always important and should be addressed on priority. Scheduling these important chats for urgent responses can help you cater to your most valued clients even during peak hours. Of course, you may want to ensure that you are able to allocate resources for these urgent responses by adopting ways and means such as asking your visitors to fill the pre-chat form to know the context of the chat; separating visitors based on location, purchase behaviour status, and tagging them according to their status and importance can help you identify the priority customer; and diverting the visitors according to the priority and thus letting the most important customers speak with your agents directly are among some of the ways that can help you not only manage the surge in chat volume effectively but fulfil the stated objectives.
Diverting
Diverting or deflecting your visitors to search and explore answers on their own is one of the most important strategies, especially when there is a sustained surge in online activities these days. You can divert some of the queries from your clients to the knowledge base or virtual agents and let visitors explore answers to their queries through these quite popular self-help ways without troubling your live agents which you can allocate to your priority or valued clients. Also, one of the ways to divert the traffic to your website and decrease the load on your agents is by using the webchat feature such as Cisco web chat, etc.
Increase efficiency through canned responses
Some of the responses from your live agents are repetitive, which can be canned by you so that the agents do not have to make efforts in typing them out whenever they need to respond to the visitors. By analysing the entire response system for repetitive responses and canning them accordingly can help you save time on the part of your live agents and increase their efficiency as well.
By adopting the above-mentioned strategies, you can optimize your resources effectively and address the queries of your most valued clients even during the surge in chat volume in peak hours by integrating hugely popular Cisco finesse chat with your system and reap all the benefits that come with it. That way, you can actually ramp up your operations during peak hours to manage the chat sessions smartly and keep your most valued clients happy and satisfied with your timely responses without any delays or wait time.