But to do this right, you need to have actionable insights. The question is, how do you get them? Where is that?live chatmeasurements come into the equation.
The idea is to use these as performance indicators to redirect when needed and continue to do what you do well.
The Importance of Tracking Your Live Chat Metrics
In every business there is a set of numbers that will help you understand where you stand. This is not necessarily relevant from an accounting perspective as other key numbers relate to other areas such as customer retention which can then translate into the type of revenue the business can generate.
Many of these metrics fall under the customer interaction umbrella, and malaysia mobile phone numbers database determining how to measure this side of the business is key to superior customer service.
Your core product or service is only one piece of the equation. Another critical piece of the puzzle is how you interact with your customer.
Think about it this way: a restaurant may have the best menu prepared by the best chef in the world. However, if the waiters are rude and inattentive, even the hungriest potential customers may choose to feel valued and go elsewhere.
Let's take a look at some of the metrics you should pay attention to if you have live chat on your website.
Key Metrics to Track in Your Live Chat
1. Chat Volume
As the name suggests, this refers to the number of chats that have been filtered. This is a metric that is usually measured over a specific time period. For example, you can look at it for a day, week, month, or even longer.
Note that this isn’t just about the number of chats handled – if there are chats missed for any reason, including customers not being able to cope with the wait time, these will still be counted.
But remember, this alone isn’t a good metric to track the success or failure of live chat — you need to consider it alongside other data points to get a full picture.
2. Daily Chats
This was briefly touched on in the article above. Maybe you have a system that provides you with aggregate totals, but you want to look at things in a bit more detail.
Here you can use the daily chat metric to give you an idea of the number of conversations your team has on a daily basis during the work week.
Maybe you want to see what performance looks like each day, or you want to get an idea of the days when your chat activity is heaviest and which days to expect it.
3. Successful Chat Conversations
This is another element of your overall volume that sits on the positive side of the fence. While different companies will likely have different definitions of what a successful chat is, these are typically the ones led by one of your reps.
Typically, your chat app of choice has a function embedded that allows the customer, the agent, or both to indicate that the conversation is complete.
Again, depending on how your business views the issue, a successful chat conversation may also take into account the customer’s rating of the interaction.
4. Missed Conversations
It’s no secret that a customer service team can’t reach every customer that reaches out. If that’s possible, the engagement side of things should be very low compared to the number of agents so that nothing is missed.
Of course, this is not optimal because it means customers will not engage with your product or service as much as desired.
As the name suggests, a missed chat is a chat that the team was unable to reach. You need to understand that there could be different reasons for this and your strategy to keep this number low needs to take these into account.
For example, you may find that many missed chats occur because a customer leaves the page before an agent accepts their chat request.
In this case, it’s probably a good idea to look at the wait time to set a precedent. For example, you might have an SLA of around one minute.
When planning how to improve, you probably don't consider chats that are canceled less than a minute after the initial request.
But the goal is always to keep missed conversations to zero, or as close to zero as possible. Remember, if you’re not finding opportunities to engage with your customer base, chances are a competitor is not.
There are solutions other than just sending more customer service representatives to the problem. For example, you can leverage a capital.chat appoffering a referral or accepting contact information for a callback so that follow-up can be made.
5. Waiting Period
This is also self-explanatory – it takes into account the amount of time a visitor to your page will wait before a customer service representative will contact them.
In most cases this is taken as an average. Missed chats will not be part of the calculation here, given that the conversation will not be acknowledged by the customer service representative.
There are two benefits to evaluating this KPI for customer service. First, it describes the team’s ability to handle traffic.
Next, many businesses use this metric to give customers an idea of how long they will likely have to wait until a representative reaches them.
6. Response Time
This is sometimes confused with the wait time metric. The best way to look at it is that wait time is based on the initial response time. In other words, after a customer initiates a request via live chat, how long does it take for an agent to accept the request and send the first message?
Response time, on the other hand, is based on the follow-up conversation, meaning when a customer sends a message, you evaluate how quickly your team member responds to the message.
But you have to be careful about how you use this metric. Sometimes customer service management places too much emphasis on numbers, causing the team to focus on the numbers rather than the actual quality of the service.
7. Duration of the Chat
This is another common method for tracking individual live chat performance. It measures the length of the conversation from beginning to end.
Ideally, the goal is to resolve the customer's query as efficiently as possible, which usually means keeping the chat time low.
However, as with the previous point, you need to be careful when deciding how to handle high durations and the extent to which reps may have to deal with the consequences.
Conversely, if you find your average figure to be too high, you will probably need to pay serious attention to the elements of speech that may be causing this problem.
8. Number of Messages per Chat
It is difficult to evaluate using this metric alone.Service Qualityand the capabilities of the team.
As the name suggests, this is a measurement of the number of messages that can be sent during a chat.
One of the problems here is that two different customers querying the same thing may create two wildly different message counts for legitimate reasons.
