How to Create a Dynamic Live Chat Strategy
Chapter 3
While live chat has received accolades from customers as a quick and efficient way to communicate with companies and organizations, one question remains – Should we offer live chat to all of our customers for every reason or scenario? Now it sounds like a great idea, but is it the best option for both company and customer? Read on as we take a deeper look for answers
When attempting to determine which customer inquiry or request is right for your live chat channel, here are a few things to consider:
Ask:
Break the analysis out by company departments. The answers to these questions will reveal your contact drivers. While this exercise may appear cumbersome, the payoff will be huge later when developing your live channel strategy. If this information is utilized properly, an increase in live chat customer satisfaction ratings will be the result as one looks to proactively deflect inquiries and requests that can be handled outside of the live chat channel. Another by-product of this analysis is the identification of operational improvement opportunities which may fall outside of the live chat channel spectrum.
Now let’s determine how valuable each of these interactions is to your company. Create three value categories – low value, medium value and high value. The interaction reasons identified during your analysis should now be valued.
Ask these questions when attempting to determine interaction value:
Please refer to Table 1 – Three Value Categories at the end of this page for what the categories might look like when filled with inquiries.
Two questions one might ask are:
Just as we did when placing value on customer inquiries, we’ll do the same for complexity. Let’s create complexity categories – low complexity, medium complexity and high complexity. Using the same requests for the valuing example, let’s see Table 2 – Three Complexity Categories on Page 5 for what a typical complexity box might contain.
Table 1 – Three Value Categories:
High Value | Medium Value | Low Value |
---|---|---|
Support requests | billing inquiry | information request |
Emails | address changes |
Table 2 – Three Complexity Categories:
High Complexity | Medium Complexity | Low Complexity |
---|---|---|
Support requests | billing inquiry | information request |
Billing inquiry | address changes |
After taking the time to complete the exercises, one is more than likely able to decide which customers inquiries and requests are prime candidates for live chat. It’s easy to see that your high value/high complexity inquiries or requests will benefit from utilizing your live chat channel. Here are a few tips for providing a great customer experience for these customers.
At Comm100, we certainly encourage the use of our live chat product to assist companies with servicing those high value/high complexity inquiries and requests. While we know that it’s important to provide a great online customer experience, we also know that it’s important to insure that your live chat channel is an efficient customer communication channel. The analytical capabilities of our product will assist you in keeping those low value/low complexity requests and inquiries to minimum in order to get maximum output from your live chat channel.
Remember – Make sure that your live chat channel is tuned for high value/high complexity customer inquiries and requests. Start by determining the volume of interactions across all communication channels, assign an interaction value to request and inquiry types and develop interaction complexity levels in order to create an efficient live chat channel.
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