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Zendesk Chat

Live Chat Tips & Tricks

Amie B
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Shortcuts

  • Shortcuts are time savers and every agent's best friend. Every agent should be aiming to utilize 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 there 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. 
  • If you have an active help center that you're customers use to find information about your company, we also encourage you to install the Knowledge Base Search app for Chat on your account.
  • 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 if you need to, or the customer requests for the conversation to be moved to another channel. Sometimes live chats aren't able to be resolved during the live chat. Times like these call for the agents' 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 cool as cool cats do. Just be you and polite. 
  • Inappropriate behavior or language by the customer is never tolerated. We recommend providing warnings to customers when needed. Check out some examples below which you can create as shortcuts.

Shortcut examples: 

Abusive Fair Warning

Our company considers that content and language to be inappropriate. If you continue to send improper messages, I will be forced to end our chat session.

 


Abusive Final Warning

We will not tolerate the use of inappropriate language. I am required to terminate our chat session immediately.

 

  • You have the option to ban a visitor in chat if they begin to display unacceptable behavior. We recommend an agent to raise this with a team leader on the spot so they can arrange for the visitor to be banned.

Chat Settings

  • Agent avatars are a nice touch to personalize and humanize 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.