Good customer service is the outcome of teamwork where various customer support teams work seamlessly in a coordinated manner.
Exceptional customer service experience can turn customers into brand advocates, whereas a single bad experience can tarnish their opinion about your product or brand.
In a recently conducted survey, “67.6% of participants said they would join the loyalty or VIP program of a brand they are loyal to (compared to 59.8% in 2019), while 56% said they would spend more on a brand they are loyal to even if cheaper options existed elsewhere (compared to 34.5% in 2019)”.
Although your customer service performance might not be dependent on just one factor, keeping an eye on key live chat metrics can help you avoid common issues like long waiting times, missed chats, and bad customer experience.
Importance of Live Chat in Customer Service
In this digital world, your customers want to know everything related to your product or service in an instant. Delays in such service might result in losing customers. So how can you respond quickly to your customers?
The answer is – Live chat.
Live chat has become a great communication tool for businesses that helps manage real-time conversations and deliver a higher level of customer satisfaction, as it is 100x faster than any other digital channel.
More than 30% of customers expect live chat on your website, as per a Forrester report.
Some of the key features of live chat are;
- It resembles an actual conversation. This gives an added advantage to the agent in building rapport with customers while resolving their queries.
- Your support agents can ask additional questions or send screenshots for troubleshooting through a chat conversation.
- You can direct customers to the right agents based on the type of help they need which will decrease your agent’s average handling time and increase first-call resolution.
- It offers offline functionality, allowing customers to leave a message even if all your agents are away. Your agents can continue the chat when they are back online.
How Live Chat Improves Your Business
Providing relevant and timely support to your customers will improve your customer retention rate and give you repeat business from loyal customers. This is where your customer service plays a huge role.
By implementing proper tools, you can offer fast and efficient customer service, ensuring customers receive the best customer experience.
Some of the key advantages of using live chat in your customer service are as follows:
- Currently, only 9% to 14% of businesses offer live chat functionality on their website. This indicates that a vast majority of businesses – likely your competitors too – are either unaware of this feature or undervaluing it. Therefore, leveraging a live chat service will give you a competitive advantage and significant opportunities to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
- Live chat is tailored for customers with its 24/7 availability, convenience, and speedy features. This allows businesses to meet high customer expectations which eventually increase their brand affinity and customer loyalty.
- Collecting information is another plus point of live chat. Chat log data helps you in pinpointing repeated customer service issues, leading the way for effective solutions.
Customer Service Live Chat Metrics
As a business, it is important to track customer service metrics in order to improve your customer experience. When you start offering live chat service, it is vital to measure your performance as well.
By continuous measurement with the relevant chat support metrics and KPIs, you can improve the chat performance experience of your customers as well as the customer support skills of your team.
1. First Response Time
This is the first live chat metric that focuses on measuring the speed of response. It helps you in measuring how much time your chat support agents take to respond to a customer’s first message.
According to a research report, 59% of the respondents were likely to buy from a company if the response time was less than 1 minute.
If the first response time is high, customer waiting time will eventually increase, resulting in an inferior customer experience.
To avoid such a situation and increase your customer satisfaction rate you should go for a ticket management system that auto-routes chat conversation to a specific team/agent based on the type of query. This will cut down the time spent manually assigning a conversation.
2. Total Volume of Chat Sessions
This live chat performance indicator measures the volume of chat and shows the number of chat sessions that have been launched. With this metric, you can easily identify the popularity of live chat over other customer support channels like calls or emails.
You can use this metric to forecast workload during peak hours and repetitive queries, and make a strategy to segment the work between various customer support teams.
3. Average Resolution Time
Average resolution time deals with the average time taken by your customer support agents to resolve a query successfully. It focuses on the quality of service your agents are providing to your customers.
Since live chat offers a real-time conversation between agents and customers, it is a lot easier for agents to understand and resolve a query in a quick turnaround time.
But if your agent’s average resolution time is high, it clearly indicates that your agents are not trained enough or are overloaded and might need the right tool to resolve customers’ queries fastly.
Businesses should provide proper training programs using the learning management system to enhance the skills of their customer support agents. You can also set up an agent assistance portal that allows agents to search through an internal knowledge base for quick resolution of queries.
4. CSAT Score
The Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score is the most popular chat support metric that measures customer satisfaction with your company or product.
CSAT score is usually determined by asking a few questions in the form of a survey sent to customers at the end of a conversation, to check their experience.
For example: How would you describe the overall shopping experience on our website?
- Highly unsatisfied
- Unsatisfied
- Neutral
- Satisfied
- Highly satisfied
You can enhance your CSAT rate by streamlining your communication channels so that customers do not face any issues while connecting with you. You should also take follow-ups on closed tickets to ensure that the resolution was effective and no further issue exists.
5. Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) calculates the likelihood of customers who would recommend your business or product to others. It is one of the crucial chat support metrics to check the strength of your relationship with customers.
NPS is rated on a 10-point scale and the methodology breaks down the score into three categories.
- Detractors: Customers who give you a score of 0 to 6, indicating dissatisfaction.
- Passives: Customers who give you a score of 7 or 8, but might not recommend your product to others.
- Promoters: Customers who give you a score of 9 or 10, indicating high chances of recommending your product to others.
To boost your NPS score, try to engage with detractors to find out what went wrong. Be open to feedback and ask your promoters how you can improve more.
6. Average Wait Time
If your customers have to wait for more than a few minutes to reach a customer support agent, they will grow impatient. That’s why monitoring your average wait time is an important chat support metric.
Generally, the average wait time is less than a few minutes. But, this metric can look entirely different during peak business hours when you receive a high volume of incoming chats.
Measuring average wait time helps you to understand whether your chat support is working effectively or not. Live chat enables you to manage multiple chat sessions simultaneously which lowers the queue time significantly.
To improve the average wait time, start examining the quality of resources your agents use in order to resolve a query. Agents should be equipped with detailed product information and other relevant details to provide efficient customer service.
7. Average Chat Duration
The average chat duration across industries revolves around 11 to 12 minutes. Agents must devote enough time to resolve a customer query in the first interaction. They often need some time to understand the problem before they can offer a solution.
If the average chat duration is too low, it is an indication that enough time is not being given to resolve the queries. Hence, it is likely to have a negative impact on the customer satisfaction rate.
If the customer support agents are taking too much time to resolve the issue, it means that they need additional training and proper guidance to address the problems quickly.
8. Conversion Rate
You can easily convert new website visitors into customers by leveraging live chat. By offering real-time and effective assistance to the customers, you can smoothly maximize your return on investment (ROI).
38% of customers made a purchase because of a good live chat session. The conversion rate metric shows the number of total visitors converted out of total visitors who chatted with a live chat agent.
9. Missed Chats
Missed chat is another important live chat KPI that tracks the missed out chats. If you are missing out on a chat because of any reason, it affects your brand reputation.
As per INC, “51% of consumers say a business needs to be available 24×7.”
Thus, missed chats are lost opportunities for you to engage with your existing as well as future customers. If your customer support team is missing out on a large number of chats, it means they do not have enough resources to handle the chat effectively.
You can combat this situation by deploying an AI-enabled chatbot that can engage with customers round the clock. A chatbot can easily handle basic queries and can easily integrate with live chat as per the situation.
Improve Your Customer Service with Kapture
Delivering the best customer service is the topmost priority for any business. And Kapture helps you in achieving this goal with its various support automation tools.
Engage with your customers in real-time and optimize your customer experience by implementing our live chat system. Never miss out on any chat and take your conversation a step further by attaching images, files, and videos whenever needed.
Enable your agents to resolve tickets faster with auto-suggested templates and canned responses.
Utilize our reporting and analytics feature with 500+ reporting formats and generate detailed reports on chat traffic, average turnaround time, first response time, missed chats, etc, to access your agent’s efficiency.
Our ticket management system lets you manage the ticket queue efficiently and smartly by tagging and prioritizing tickets based on the keywords used by customers.
Interested to know more about us?
Connect with our product experts today and transform your customer service with innovative and smart collaboration tools.
About the Author | |
 | Shivika |
| Shivika is a Content Writer at Kapture CRM, who enjoys using her creative skills to contribute to the exciting technological advances. She is passionate about cultural artifacts and culinary art. | |
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