Live Chat Tips & Tricks

Before embarking on cutting over chat for your business, here are a few tips and tricks that we hope will make that transition a little easier... Remember that chat is a great way to easily engage with your customers, resolve issues swiftly and be able to manage a higher volume of enquiries than say using the telephone.

It does, however, come with responsibilities... the main one being the responsibility of quick responses back to the customer. As we've all experienced sometime in our life, waiting on a chat for a customer service representative to respond is frustrating, and there is a time limit before you simply shutdown that tab and go to another website. So, make sure you have done your homework and are providing the service your customers deserve.

Shortcuts

• Shortcuts are time savers and every agent's best friend. They provide agents with the ability to make super speedy responses to your standard chats. Every agent should be aiming to utilise shortcuts to help them answer chats more efficiently and in a timely manner.
• As a Chat Administrator, best practice is to add as many global chat shortcuts as you can when you first launch your live chat service. This will help get your team started more easily and confidently using Chat from day one.
• We recommend admins proactively manage shortcuts and keep them up to date over time. 
• We also encourage agents to create their own personal shortcuts as everyone has their own different style of chatting. 

Chat Apps

• Just like Zendesk Support, you can also install apps on Chat to help your agents get more information about your customers and help them with their chats. There's a wide range of chat apps available for installation in the Zendesk Marketplace. 
  • Zendesk Marketplace
• If you have a self service strategy, and are using the Zendesk help center to do this, we also encourage you to install the Knowledge Base Search app for Chat on your account.
  • Install Knowledge Base Search Chat app
• Encourage your agents to use the Knowledge Base app during their live chat sessions. It allows them to search your linked Zendesk Help Center for public articles and send them to chat visitors without needing to navigate away from the chat window. 

During Chat

• It's OK during the conversation to request to move the chat to another channel, if the issue is more complex and better resolved elsewhere. Sometimes issues aren't able to be resolved during the live chat. Times like these call for the agent's best judgment in moving the engagement to another channel such as offline email or a callback to follow up at a later time. 
• A live chat conversation is a lot less informal, but a much faster channel for the customer to get their issue resolved. Keep it relatively informal, respectful and above all useful to quickly resolve the issue. 
• Inappropriate behaviour or language by the customer should never be tolerated. We recommend creating a couple of customer warnings in your shortcuts, so agents have them ready when needed. Check out some examples below which you can create as shortcuts.

Shortcut examples: 

• Once you have provided the warning and the customer continues to be abusive, simply ban the visitor in chat. We recommend an agent to raise this with a team leader on the spot and capture some internal notes on the ticket to support those actions.

Chat Settings

• Agent avatars are a nice touch to personalise and humanise the chat experience for your customers. These can be cartoon/vector or real images of the agents. 
• Admins can leverage the operating hours feature to ensure your chat widget is displayed correctly online/offline to the customer at the relevant times of the day.
• We recommend using the pre-chat form on the chat widget so you can capture the customer's name and question prior to them starting a new chat. This saves the agent time in having to ask and probe for more information to kickstart the conversation. 

Answerbot

• As customers love using Chat, you need a way to help them find answers without inundating your chat agents with those simple questions. Zendesk Answerbot is a great way to have a automated attendant assist and suggest answers to customers in the front-line, and then pass them onto a human if the suggested answers were not helpful. The key to the success on this one is having the right content in your Help Center and allowing a quick and easy transition to a human chat agent when it is required.

With those tips and tricks, we trust you are not ready to offer chat to your customers and ensure you provide the best experiences that your customers deserve.

Book in a time with us today to find out how to improve your customer engagement and customer experiences