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Call Center Operations - Are You Focused on Quality Web Chat?

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Managing multiple interaction channels in the call center is not necessarily a new concept, but the emerging role of Web chat is gaining more attention. A company’s presence on the Web is more important than ever and an increased focus in call center operations is on delivering the support necessary to enhance the customer experience. 

According to this Knowlagent blog, the implementation and management of chat enables the organization to draw customers away from the phone channel – which happens to be the most expensive. Call center operations that provide a unique approach to service that is more immediate and dynamic than email boosts the perceived value of the interaction. 

Chat agents operating within call center operations are generally equipped with the necessary collaboration tools to greatly enhance customer comfort with any Web-based self-service application. As a result, customer autonomy is increased, while operational costs are effectively decreased. 

Fortunately, there are call center operations best practices that demonstrate the optimal approach to Web chat:

Advanced chat management systems – it’s true that the most basic of chat tools will still work, but the point is to amaze and satisfy customers. You want this chat system to incorporate access to complete customer history, skills-based routing functionality, dynamic FAQs, detailed response templates, Web collaboration tools and multilingual capabilities. 

Workforce management integration – call center operations benefit greatly when forecasting the workload and scheduling agents is incorporated into the Web chat channel. Without this key integration, understaffing or overstaffing can easily occur. 

Hire and train with chat success in mind – the best technology integration in the world means little if your people don’t know how to handle customer requests. They also need to know how to spell correctly, use proper grammar and type quickly. Pay attention to the needs of your Web chat channel when developing the roles within your call center operations. 

Measure the important metrics – you need to consistently select and measure the chat metrics that pay attention to the needs of your business and your customers. Straight productivity metrics do matter, but you really want to pay attention to the metrics like chat quality, chat resolution rate, customer satisfaction, chat resolution and the number of times your agents forget to thank the customer. 

Effective call center operations rely on integrated practices throughout to deliver the value-added experience for the customer, and additional revenue for the organization. Without clear expectations and best practices in place for complete management across all channels, the customer experience could suffer, which ultimately impacts the bottom line.


Edited by Jamie Epstein