Implementing Live Chat Process to Your Online Business

For companies that want to integrate live chat on their ecommerce store, it is important to consider the people that would use the tool to communicate with customers. Online chat is a growing channel for customer service because it is cost-effective (even free) and requires less number of agents to become fully effective for business. Quite a bad-ass bargain you’ll have if you hook your online

In the previous article, I chattered about why you badly need to outsource your live chat with all its glorious benefits for business but I was remiss about sharing how to implement the live chat process to your online business.

Don’t fret too much, it’s not like I’m gonna leave you hangin’. Offerchat loves you too much to do that. Listed below are the five (5) not-so simple things to do to go forward with the implementation of live chat on your website:

1. Determine your primary reason for outsourcing your live chat

Are you outsourcing your chats merely to save costs or are you for great customer experience? Knowing the reason for hiring outsourced chat agents will determine how far you’ll go in your selection of live chat provider.

You can go and spend big bucks to hire outsource chat agents by the hour or you can select one that charges per chat, even go for live chat provider that boasts of max chat volume but this will particularly lessen the quality of customer service.

2. Decide on the number of chat operators you’ll need and the schedules they’ll cover.

Research shows that one chat operator can handle 3-4 concurrent chats, which is more than a phone support can say (literally speaking), and still keep the quality of the chat. Full or 24/7 chat coverage will require 5 or more chat agents. But if you, as the product owner, can handle the chats yourself when available, you can just hire chat operators to fill the gap when you are busy.

3. Set qualifications for your chat operators that best suit your business.

You want to make sure that someone handling your chat isn’t messing up the whole support thing with “I don’t knows” or “No clues” or sending bunch of URLs to your customers. To give you an idea of skills you’d require a chat agent, here is a list of characteristics that a strong agent possesses based on a research conducted by Telus International.

• Confident
• Knowledgeable about the company and its products
• Directly responds to questions asked
• Drives chat to positive closure
• Don’t allow internal metric focus block customer experience

4. Prepare information, knowledgebase (FAQ) and/or product manual.

Outsourced chat agents need assistance as well when mastering your company, products and services. Before hiring your live chat agents from any chat outsourcing provider prepare your knowledgebase (FAQ), product manuals and other details relevant to your customers.

Chat agents assigned to you will need all the help they can get to provide your customers exceptional customer experience on your website.

5. Coordinate with live chat provider to help chat implementation

Implementing a live chat process to any business website takes more than integrating the live chat software and hiring agents. Mastery of the tool is imperative to maximize the customer service advantage both elements brings.

Many live chat providers offer simply the code and won’t do more to help you with actually incorporating it to your business process. Can you see how ironic that is? So, it pays to learn first what a chat tool provider can do for you especially when it’s your first time implementing live chat.

It would also be grand if they have an implementation support or better if they have in-house chat agents available for outsource. You’ll definitely bag a jackpot with that one, if you can find one provider that offers both.