COVID’19 Pandemic has changed the way we work and communicate with each other. Consequently, businesses are rapidly advancing their strategies to sustain and thrive in these turbulent times. While personal visits have taken a backseat, remote working, and online engagement is the new trend. During this time of intensified uncertainty and isolation, people look forward to digital channels as a quick means of communication. As a result of all of these, customer service organizations are struggling with unpredictable call volumes, troubled customers, raised levels of agent absenteeism, and a shift towards home-working.
Why are chat channels in Contact Centers attaining attention?
Contact centers these days are striving to provide satisfactory customer service in current business situations. As a quick escape to this, many organizations have started diverting their inbound traffic to chat platforms to support high volumes of parallel conversations better and to diverge phone calls to remote agents further.
In times of increased volume, a ticketing management system, or a customer engagement software with an effective chat platform in place can allow brands to cater to customers’ demands flexibly. With modern chat solutions, agents can build conversations around resolutions, not just sessions, whether the customer needs real-time help or extended help over several hours or days. Quick chat responses mean happy customers and a reduced burden on your customer success team. The logic behind this is straightforward – your customers resent waiting!
Now you must be having a lot of questions like How you can improve your customer’s chat experience? Or What all your ticketing management system needs to deliver remarkable results via chat?
Here are a few key turning points outlined below:
- Intelligent Bot Integration: AI-based Bot integration with the routine chat platforms that are in working can automate mundane query handling. As a result, agents would be relieved from the regular queries, and they would have more time to revert to the complex ones. An agent can be assigned a chat that needs a more close conversation. The agent can have the entire context of the chat with a quick transfer of previous chat history. Furthermore, to help supervisors with better demarcation on chats handled by agents and by the bot, the dashboards can have separate widgets to notify Served, Missed, Not Responded chats for bot and agent. Extensive chat dashboards would help build the chat handling strategy and improve its effectiveness.
- Powerful Internal Chat Option to Collab with your Team: Taking the example of the BPO industries, as in current times, they have moved their daily chat or call handling operations to available WFH solutions. Numerous customer support staff is directly working and doing login from their home locations. To get a one-on-one status update or to communicate an essential announcement to the agents about various things, supervisors or team leaders need an effective internal chat option. Supervisors, while relaying the message, require an acknowledgment of the broadcast messages to have active remote communication with their team and to check the status of message dispersal. Internal chat with fellow peers would also help the teams to collaborate better and perform as a team.
- Comprehensive Chat Specific Dashboards: Contact center operations specialists often rely on traditional metrics — such as the average speed of answer and average handling times — to determine the effectiveness of their operations. While these statistics help in assessing how well agents are performing, it does not provide comprehensive information on the customer experience and agents’ productivity and overall operational efficiency. The market is changing; henceforth is the need to change the working strategy and the KPIs to check the effectiveness of it. Dashboards with a custom refresh time showcasing updated average wait time and average resolution time can help in planning the workforce allocation and their training to improve the numbers. Moreover, detailed analytics on the state of tickets, the users working on them, the source chat channel they came in through, all of these can help in planning the operational execution strategy, and how things need to be improved.
- Streamlined Feedback Collection: One way to improve customer satisfaction is to send a follow-up email after the chat has ended or to ask customers for their feedback. This voice of customer data can be compelling. Ticketing dashboards providing a detailed view of data on CSAT score with a bifurcated count of feedback requested and count of feedback received can help improve the customer experience as well as the methods to collate more accurate feedbacks. It gives direction to the next plan of action with positive feedback meaning things are going right, but any passive or negative comments need an immediate address.
In the nutshell
Customer engagement via chat channels, be it Whatsapp, live chat, messenger, or twitter dm, is now a “must-have” communication point for any business. By enabling your customer journey with chat channels, you could provide more express customer support, and deliver more loyal customer experience. Considering that chat is one of the faster customer communication tools to implement, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be using it to serve your customers. Ameyo’s helpdesk ticketing system has all the advanced features that are needed to transform your customer experience via chat.
If you’re not using chat in your ticketing management system already, then now is an excellent time to start! Book your demo to hear from our experts on a live call today.