You want to be successful with chat almost as much as we want you to succeed with chat. But getting started on the path to success as a chat agent can be daunting, especially if chat is uncharted territory. We sat down with our Client Success Manager, Leor, to discuss some chat best practices.
1. What are some easy things chat agents can do to be successful?
There are many things you can do as a chat agent without having to go to your administrator for help! One of the easiest is to make sure you have your desktop notifications enabled and that your volume on your computer is up so you can hear sound notifications. This will help you hear incoming chats, repeat messages, and will help keep you from getting auto-paused. Another very easy way to be successful is to simply be online and ready to chat. This may seem like a no brainer, but it can be easy to stay “paused” throughout the day, so check every once in a while that you are still “online” to answer incoming chats. If you are using SnapEngage specifically, we recommend that you have the Conversations Hub in a separate browser window because browsers can throttle tabs and not allow notifications to come through. This way, all communication will be smooth.
2. I get a ton of frequently asked questions and it can be cumbersome to type the same thing multiple times to multiple people. How can chat make my life easier in this regard?
Many companies offer a “shortcuts” or canned messages feature. Learn these shortcuts! You may already have some canned messages in place, try them out! Some example shortcuts include answers to frequently asked questions, your office hours, anything at all that makes sense for your business. SnapEngage users can view shortcuts in the Conversations Hub by clicking on the Shortcuts button where you enter your chat text. We even take it one step further, and you can find suggested shortcuts by simply typing the first few letters of a shortcut and choosing the one you need.
Shortcuts are added by your account administrator or a sub-admin in the admin dashboard. After you have familiarized yourself with existing shortcuts, feel free to look for gaps and coordinate with your administrator to suggest some new shortcuts that will be handy for the team. Once your admin adds the shortcuts they will be available for everyone to view and use.
3. My team is often asked if they are bots. We want to portray ourselves as a real human team who understands our clients’ needs and are eager to help.
We know what you mean, we are also asked this question and have to assure the client that we are, indeed, human people 🙂 We train our team on using our company tone and voice. We find this fitting because on chat, you are literally the voice of the company. The voice and tone of you as a chat agent can make or break the customer experience. Your company most likely has certain values that can help guide you when chatting with clients. Are you kind and honest and value your clients’ feedback? Chat is a method for communicating these values and your clients will feel the love.
We like to make our clients and site visitors feel at home. If you see their email or that this is someone you have chatted or emailed previously, feel free to greet them by name. This small gesture will help your visitors feel more relaxed and welcomed. A good rule of thumb is that if you treat visitors as friends, they will return the favor.
4. If someone is new to using chat and is striving to be the best chat agent on the team, where is a good place to start?
Simple, know your website. If you are new or even if your website has gone through a recent redesign, it is always important to stay up-to-date on current website happenings. When you know where everything is, you can quickly respond to site visitors when they come asking questions, or know where in your website you can go to start looking for quick answers.
We have a collaborative approach here at SnapEngage. When we make website changes we alert the rest of the team and send the link to the new page to make sure we are all growing in knowledge together. Team chat can be a great place to share any questions or extra bits of information.
5. Chat is an excellent way to further provide a delightful customer experience. What is your advice to those agents who want to maximize the experience even further?
Continually work to improve your response time. If you’re ever in a response time rut, have a competition with your coworker! Your administrator can check your average response times for the past week and whoever has the lowest response time wins! We highly recommend ice cream for the victor.
We like to take this one step further, and keep response time in mind not just for the first response to a visitor, but for all responses during a chat. If you are investigating an issue for a client and need to debug something, let them know you are working on it and if it will take a long time to solve, offer to follow up with them via phone/email. The more communication, the better.
6. I have a hard time showing clients exactly what to look for. How can I streamline this process?
Screenshots and screencasts are a great way to show a client exactly where or what they need to do. We recommend a free program like JING for doing this. Keep in mind that not everyone is a visual learner and some may prefer help documentation. If you have a company help site and are using SnapEngage, make sure your administrator enables the help site in the knowledge-base section of the Conversations Hub from the Admin Dashboard.
We hope this helps drive your performance as a chat agent. We only touched the surface on all of the things that make a successful agent and there are always ways to improve. Reach out to us if you’re ready to take yourself to the next level and we are always happy to nerd out about chat with you.
Here are some parting words from Leor about what inspires him to delight our clients on a daily basis.
“What inspires me most about delighting clients is deepening the relationship between their business and SnapEngage. Our main goal is to help clients be successful, so when I am able to help solve an issue, I believe that I am enriching their lives and making their work days better.”