Live Chat Performance Benchmarks 2021 with Best Practices

Benchmark your live chat team against these key metrics to understand where your team is succeeding, and where you need to pick it up, with live chat best practices to help you on your journey. This data comes from analysis of over 66 million live chats that passed through Comm100’s global platform in 2020.

Wait time: 35 seconds

Best practices

• Encourage self-serve with knowledge bases on your website and within the chat window
• Employ a chatbot to manage common, repetitive queries and provide 24/7 support
• Set up pre-chat surveys to collect data about the customer and their query.

Chat duration: 9 minutes 45 seconds

Best practices

• Use agent-facing AI that provides agents with answers to customer questions in real-time
• Set up automatic chat routing by department and agent based on customer query, location, source, and navigation history
• Take advantage of canned messages and keyboard shortcuts to send faster responses.

CSAT score: 4.3 / 5

Best practices

• Use a unified console that gives your agents information about the customer, supported by CRM integration
• Offer audio and video chat to connect with customers on a personal level
• Use built-in auto chat translation so it’s easy to chat with visitors who speak different languages.

Mobile chats: 54%

Best practices

• Make sure your live chat button’s positioning, size, and color is optimized for mobile
• Use a live chat solution that automatically adjusts the size of the live chat window
• Set up an offline message for out-of-hours so agents can follow-up later.