How to Close the Live Chat “Delivery Gap”
By Alex Bloom, President, Velaro
Your agents are working hard. Customers seem happy. But how can you be sure you’re delivering the service your customers expect?
According to an oft-cited report by Bain & Company, 80% of companies that were asked believed they were offering a “superior experience” to their customers. However, when their actual customers were surveyed, just 8% agreed. Don’t fall into the trap of making assumptions about how customers are receiving your customer service efforts. With the analytics tools available through today’s leading live chat platforms, there is no reason for this “delivery gap” to persist. Follow these steps to obtain and leverage critical insights into customer experience to ensure you’re meeting expectations.
Look at the data.
The best live chat platforms provide many avenues for performance tracking, but it’s important to decide what metrics help you reliably measure customer satisfaction. If you focus too heavily on one key performance indicator (KPI), you may get a skewed perception of success.
For instance, you may think, chat volume is up – great, our live chat platform is gaining traction and customers are engaging. However, an unexpected spike in activity may indicate that you are lacking key information about new products on your site or that your FAQs or technical manuals are incomplete. Analyze multiple KPIs, review chat transcripts and consider other contextual data to help fill in the blanks when trends shift unexpectedly rather than assuming the cause.
Gather feedback.
A lot can lie between the lines of a chat transcript. That’s why it’s important to directly survey your customers on their chat experience. You can obtain measured and qualitative feedback during or after a chat session with intuitive surveys.
The best live chat platforms also allow website visitors to express pleasure or displeasure with individual lines of text written by your agents. By gathering this granular feedback, you equip your organization with the intel needed to better anticipate potentially negative triggers and adapt your best practices accordingly.
Keep improving.
Just as your brand evolves so, too, will the needs of your customers. Make sure your customer service organization is equipped to manage these shifting needs. Take a quick pulse on performance by looking at
Net Promoter Scoring to see where expectations are being met and where improvement is needed.
But don’t stop there. Examine the transcripts for chat sessions that performed extremely well or poorly in post-chat surveys. Use your live chat platform to monitor individual agent performance and look for coachable moments to provide real-time feedback.
With the proper intelligence to guide you, your customer service organization can continue to improve, turning bad customer experiences into good ones and good experiences into great ones.