Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Web Chat Is Becoming Increasingly Important to Customers and Critical to the Contact Center
For customers today, a company’s Web site is the single most important destination before a purchase is made. Even if the purchase is ultimately made in a brick-and-mortar store, more often than not, the buying journey begins on a Web site, either on a personal computer or a phone’s mobile browser.
The Web customer support experience, however, is no longer about customers finding their own answers on an FAQ page. Increasingly, they expect to interact with a company agent in a live capacity while they’re on the Web site. This explains, in part, the increasing popularity of Web chat for customers. According to a recent blog post by Zendesk, about 44 percent of customers report that having a live person answer their questions while they’re in the middle of an online purchase on a Web site is one of the most important features a company can offer.
Zendesk recently produced an infographic that highlights the importance of chat to customers today. The data used was pulled from Zendesk’s own research, plus information from Forrester (News - Alert), the Wall Street Journal and Zopim. In addition to the 44 percent of customers valuing a chat session with a live agent, other highlights include:
- 42 percent of customers say chat’s most important benefit is readily available, instant access to a customer service rep without hold time.
- 60 percent of customers hate waiting longer than one minute for support.
- 77 percent of shoppers want contact with a real person before buying, and more than half say a lack of this interaction have stopped them from buying.
- Customer’s satisfaction levels with live chat are 73 percent: higher than for any other Web-based channel (61 percent with email, 53 percent with apps and 48 percent for social media).
So we get that chat is critical: customers like it, and companies can offer robust customer support at less cost than telephone support. (Chat also means that customers aren’t bothered by details like heavy foreign accents.) But how do you ensure that you’re devoting enough time to chat? Most companies build schedules today for phone calls and pay only the barest lip-service to scheduling other media.
Today’s multimedia and cloud-based workforce scheduling solutions are critical to getting the balance between phone and Web support right. In order to properly optimize the workforce and ensure no channels are getting ignored, managers must be able to schedule agents with strong chat abilities in the same way they would agents dedicated to phone support. This way, chat can be built right into the queue along with phone calls and other media such as e-mail.
As more customers become accustomed to using live Web chat – and technologies such as the WebRTC standard make it easier to communicate in various ways inside a live browser session – it will become more and more important to ensure that the call center is prepared. This means it may be time to reevaluate current workforce scheduling and optimization practices.