Perfect Response Time, Positive Brand Image!
We say ‘hi’ just when your visitors need to hear from you & keep the conversation going!
What is the Response Time?
The means of communication have been evolving ever since we first discovered the telephone and today, we’re on a whole new level of reaching out to businesses. A minor delay can upset the hurried visitor finding answers on your website when it comes to the live chat support. In the customer support industry, the average response time is referred to as the time an average agent takes to respond to your visitor’s queries.
Note that the agent’s response is different than the automated greetings that appear on your website’s chatbox whenever a new visitor arrives there seeking some sort of information. Ideally, a minimum response time is considered a positive measure to rate a live chat’s quality.
How Do We Calculate Our Response Time?
We’ve invested our resources and energies in improving our live chat quality and average response time is one crucial aspect of our chat support’s structure. We evaluate an agent’s response time from the moment the visitor asks his query in the chatbox excluding the automated greeting message time. Here are some transparent metrics to calculate the ideal response time that we use:
Queue List
Like the busiest cash counters, we all silently despise live chat support having the longest queue list. We limit the chat queue number (i.e. chats waiting to be answered) per agent to distribute chat volumes equally amongst the agents.
Here’s how we do it:
- Limiting queue chat volume per agent (For maintaining agent response time)
- Answering every chat within 20 seconds (excluding greeting message)
- Reducing missed chats (ones can’t be answered within 30 seconds timeframe)
Ongoing Chats Analysis
We keep account of each live chat interaction by each agent for maintaining quality. Because one slight negligence can taint your image, so we give this metrics a high priority:
- Total chats per online agent
- Assigned chat per agent (not more than 5)
- Unresponded message vs next agent’s response ratio
- Overall visitor’s chat experience
These metrics help us further impove our live chat response time & offer a tailored experience according to each visitor.
Agents’ Working
One of the ways we measure our chat response time is by evaluating how our agents work. The key metrics that we note are:
- Logged in agent quantity
- Online agent ratio
- On-break agent numbers
- Agents with ‘Invisible’ status
Using this method also helps us in tracking live chat agent’s performance, too, along with smartly distributing the chats amongst available agents on the floor.
Satisfaction Level
Extensive agent training, updated live chat software, and multiple metrics all for ensuring customer satisfaction. While we rate our agent’s performance we keep on checking your website visitor’s overall experience every 30 seconds.
How?
- By measuring overall chat ratings
- By measuring chats rated as ‘Good’
- By measuring chats rated as ‘Bad’
This practice allows us to overview our performance and to do better next with every future live chat.
How We Optimize Our Response Time?
From the point of clicking chat box until he gets to hear from the agent, website visitor’s patience level goes up and down and this is our challenge. We’ve trained our live chat support agents to respond in minimum of 20 second’s window (which may vary in some cases though) and be the sign of hope. It’s because an average website visitor would have so many confusions that needs to be answered without waiting for hours. As you miss to meet the 20-seconds window mark, he’ll fly away to another tab and you’ll lose a potential customer. So, we’ve devised a mechanism to optimize our response time for website visitors of varying nature.
Personalized History
Our visitor tracking starts from the point he lands on the website and we keep on noticing his frequent visits until he feels to talk with one of our live chat agent. This tracking proves to be very helpful in optimizing our response time for every visitor pressing the chat button. Our agents are given both scripted and canned responses based on the visitor’s detailed website access history that keeps the conversation going in a smooth order.
Scripted or Canned Responses
Based on chat records, we keep on experimenting with our chat responses (scripted & canned responses) to improve our response time. Some chat scenarios just need a canned (predefined) response and others need a more elaborate explanation. We train our chat experts to choose canned or scripted responses very carefully for offering a satisfied answer to visitor’s queries during the live chat interaction.
Categorized Automation Buckets
One of the ways we use for maintaining our response time is through categorized automation buckets that equip our chat agents to be prepared for any query. For meeting our SLAs as well as response-time goals, we keep our automation software updated for serving the visitor on these metrics:
- Priority-based tagged email queries
- Geographical boundary-based queries
- Persona-based queries (High profile/loyal buyers)
Stay Proactive
We know you’ve questions and we’re always here to answer them with a proactive approach. Not only our agents but every webpage and FAQs section is designed to offer you a relevant answer that leads the visitor to exactly what’s he’s searching on the website.
This preparation is what helps our chat experts to direct your visitors into a detailed resource that either guides them towards more relevant questions or convinces them to final, checkout, page. And using this approach dually benefits your business, one by keeping the response time on an accurate level and secondly by boosting your sales.
Integrated Support
One of the reasons for maintaining an ideal response time is because we equip our live chat agents with everything they need to know about the visitor. Our live chat software gives the agent an insight into visitor’s navigational patterns, what sections has he visited or his area of interest on each page that allows them to ask the right questions during their interaction and guide the visitor in a proper manner.
On Floor Support
In order to achieve the ideal response time, we’ve incorporated AI technology that identifies critical chats to help the on-floor team separate them from regular chats. This provides the live chat team an opportunity to handle complex, critical chats with an experienced approach and resolve the issues in a non-prolong manner.