All kinds of businesses add live chat to their website, but not everyone makes the most of it. B2B organisations that deliver call centre services can differentiate themselves by offering live chat support. Live chat software is convenient for call centre clients as it can increase sales, reduce costs and offer greater functionality than more traditional correspondence, like e-mail and phone. Exactly how much live chat software benefits a call centre provider will depend on choosing the right system, settings and implementation. As live chat software experts we regularly see businesses that chose the wrong live chat solution, failed to implement it correctly or didn’t explore the solution’s full potential.

Here are our top call centre tips accompanied by some inspiring quotes to motivate you to action!

Reporting, Reporting, Reporting

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” — Albert Einstein

Comprehensive and accessible reports are the call centres best friend. How do you expect clients to take your service seriously if you can’t monitor your own performance?

Real-time monitoring and an archive of historical data can help you to concentrate your live chat efforts, but tracking this data is only half the battle. Raw data needs to be manipulated into meaningful information that the call-centre and its clients can use to drive action. In the same way that phone operators are assessed based on wait time, number of calls handled successfully/unsuccessfully and customer feedback, live chats need performance management. Thankfully it’s fairly easy and much more cost-effective to track and categorise missed chats, abandoned chats and completed chats.

Call Centres should have an accurate picture of who their best and worst-performing agents are once the raw data has been interpreted. The ability to compress and store customer engagements is one of the biggest advantages live chat has over the phone and allows call centres and clients to identify the best individuals to handle angry customers, operators with the best knowledge about the product/service as well as those who simply need a bit more training. As Einstein points out, anyone can know the data. The trick is having a live chat software provider that can teach you how to understand what it means. Call centres need to remember this when they add live chat to their offering.

Integrate Business Systems

“It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream… But if you pour too much cream in it, you won’t even know you ever had coffee…” — Malcolm X.

The human rights activist was fighting against racial segregation but this profound statement is also practical advice for call centres that want to get the most out of their live chat software: Integration.

Automating routine processes allows chat operators to focus on the sale or service they are providing instead of the account they need to access and information they need to retrieve for that customer. Call centres that make the initial effort to integrate live chat software with their CRM system see a 5% or higher increase in sales conversion and reduce the average chat time. For example, Click4Assistance can integrate with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to automatically create new leads, prepopulate variable and retrieve client account information upon initiation of a chat. If this sounds too technical then call centres still stand to benefit from the ability of our live chat software to recognise return visitors through their IP address and location.

The depth and breadth of an integration will vary a great deal from call centre to call centre. It won’t always be a CRM system either. Call centres can receive a quote to integrate any business system they like, including management information, decision support and transaction processing systems. The fact that live chat is rooted in digital means it is easier to integrate with ERP systems than traditional phone communications.

Cost-Cutting Changes

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” — Winston Churchill

This blog has actually been making a fundamental mistake by using the term call centres when, really, the addition of email, live chat and SMS has seen them become contact centres. Live chat software itself is not a trend, it’s already here and has been for the last 10 years. This last point is about rolling with the changes. In order to compete with contact centres, call centres need to start offering their clients a multichannel service. So if you work for, are invested in or manage… read the blog at Click4Assistance, the home of live chat software.