Live Chat for Customer Service: a UX Case Study
2021 / RESEARCH + DATA ANALYSIS + BUSINESS & UX STRATEGY
OVERVIEW
Recently Takeaway.com and JustEat have become one. This merger made our company much bigger, more complex and expanded operations in several new countries. With these new challenges, many teams around JET (Just Eat Takeaway.com) have started to work on the integration of both of these platforms to create a global as well as local consumer experience across markets.
As we prepared to migrate the Takeaway.com services in Denmark and Norway, we had a new challenge — to integrate a pre-existing live chat to connect consumers directly with our customer support team. With that in mind, the product team questioned if it might be a good idea to implement in all of our other customer support teams spread all over Europe. That’s when I proposed to my team that I could write a case study about Live Chat, so we could make an informed decision about its implementation.
My goal was to answer the following questions:
- Is Live Chat worthy as a feature? (Business and user value)
- Will our customer service agents be able to handle the amount of messages? (Capacity)
- In which scenarios is Live Chat actually needed? (Moments of a Journey)
APPROACH
In order to achieve my objective, I used the following resources:
- Knowledge from experts inside the company (30 min interviews);
- Desk Research on available info in the internet (Backed Research, Experts reports, etc);
- Deep dive in internal documentation on the topic (Google Slides, Sheets, Dashboards, etc).
“If a user contacts customer service, it means your online channels have failed to address that user’s needs. Aim to eliminate the customers’ need to contact your organisation (…). Let’s be honest, nobody wants to sit on hold to talk with a support representative, no matter how nice that person might be.” — Kim Salazar
IS LIVE CHAT WORTHY AS A FEATURE? 🧐
By helping customers resolve their issues when things go wrong, we can gain their trust and build long-lasting relationships. Customers often remember experiences that even though started off badly were turned around with remarkable customer service. That said, is Live Chat really the ideal solution to make an outstanding experience for our users? As fellow developers would say: it depends.
The ultimate expectation for a Live Chat from a user’s perspective is that they will get a solution (or reply) instantly. When a company implements this service, it is essential they have the capacity to deliver a quick response rate. This feature does not make any sense if for every message the user sends they have to wait for 5 minutes to get a reply.
Based on internal research done by JET in 2020, “A self service route for getting help is perceived (by users) as quicker and easier as they don’t have to confront someone. Contact methods such as calling or chatting are perceived to be slower due to queue wait times and because they have to explain their issue or complaint several times.”
“When a company implements this feature (Live Chat), it is essential to make sure that they have the capacity to deliver in a quick response rate.”
According to EConsultancy, 79% of consumers favour live chat support as it allows for almost instant responses. Another common reason for communicating through this channel is the fact that while using it, consumers can multitask.
The average length of an online live chat in 2018 was 11 minutes and 24 seconds. Nonetheless, the time spent chatting with a CS agent is dependent on the user’s needs and understanding. Also, the option to use Live Chat is not the ideal solution for all visitors — some users refuse to initiate chats, which are more impersonal, as well as for accessibility reasons.
DO WE HAVE CAPACITY FOR QUICK RESPONSES? 👨👩👧👦
There are two sides to every coin. Live chat agents are running into various obstacles while trying to provide customers with fast and accurate solutions. In a CCW Digital’s survey from 2018, the highest percentage of organisations (80.28%) agreed that their chat teams have to rely on multiple systems for getting the information customers to need. And that’s not different in our case: our customer support agents reported that they have to navigate through a myriad of tools and systems to deal with just one ticket.
In addition to that, more than half of all contact requests from consumers towards Customer Support are about urgent problems related to an active order. However, our support team is not always the best contact point for many of these problems. For example: if a user ordered from a restaurant that has their own delivery crew and the food is late, the issue is better handled directly with the restaurant rather than our customer service agents.
If we consider all of this, one might conclude that we could face serious challenges regarding our ability to reply to users promptly within a live chat, causing frustration and leading them to abandon our product. As mentioned on Forrester’s Raising the Bar report, 1 in 5 customers are willing to stop using a product or service for slow response times via online chat.
So, if you want to improve customer satisfaction rates, you need to respond quickly to live chat requests. Unfortunately, most companies don’t. The average wait time, in terms of how long it takes for a company to acknowledge a live chat message is 2 minutes and 40 seconds. That’s almost as long as average wait times for phone support. Customers contacting via email expect a response within 6 hours, whereas chat customers expect an immediate response, in less than 30 seconds.
IN WHICH SCENARIOS IS LIVE CHAT ACTUALLY NEEDED? 🔀
Not all of our customers would benefit from a live chat experience. Based on NN/Group’s study on customer support Omnichannel UX, companies should provide multiple options for contacting customer service. Every customer issue has its own unique circumstances, context, and level of urgency, so don’t force all of your users down the same path to contact your organisation. Provide people with the flexibility and level of information they need in order to choose the contact channel best suited for their situation.
Taking a closer look at the “Venn Diagram of customer contact channels” below, one can observe that:
- Live Chat (online chat) is a private discussion between a user and a customer service agent;
- It is mostly used for basic issues or when users need to consult customer service;
- Live Chat requires an immediate response and resolution;
- It’s important to customers that they speak with a real person.
With that in mind, one might ask in which scenarios are Live Chat needed? How might we make sure this tool is being offered at the right moment, to the right user and how might we filter this?
SO… NOW WHAT? 🤷🏽♀️
In conclusion, if a user contacts customer service, it means your online channels have failed to address that user’s needs.
Live Chat is a popular means for contacting customer service and has the potential to bring benefits to the company as well as increase customer satisfaction. However, for it to be effective, it needs to be easy to find and supply prompt, clear, and detailed responses. It has to feel human and personal and it has to be CS agents' first priority.
Besides, in order to build a good chat user experience, we need to follow some best practices. NN/Group created some guidelines based on extensive user research on chat experiences that companies should take into consideration when exploring this feature.
Also, if your product and design teams are thinking about implementing a chat feature, I would highly recommend you partner up with stakeholders like your Customer Support team to study their capacity further. What is their context today? How many simultaneous chats can each agent handle in order to meet users’ expectations of getting a reply in less than 30s? Would this be enough in peak hours? For which user problems is Live Chat useful? Those are extremely relevant questions to be asked before applying this feature and running an MVP test.
Thanks to my leader, Leonie Brewin, for the support and help with this article. And thank you for reading it! Don’t hesitate to send me a message, I’d love to hear from you: 🔗 My Instagram | 🔗 My LinkedIn
