Ensuring that your consumers can reach you in a single click (or two) is critical to providing excellent digital customer care, which is why live chat is such a popular customer support channel. However, if you aren't prepared, the amount of conversations you get may become overwhelming. You don't want your employees to feel overwhelmed with visitor enquiries, which is a larger difficulty than ever for many customer care teams right now.

To assist you in dealing with a high amount of client inquiries, we've compiled a list of best practises for handling high chat volumes so your agents can keep doing what they do best: having meaningful interactions with your customers.

Providing Priority

Everyone understands that certain conversations are simply more valuable than others. When there is an increase in chat volume, you don't want to keep your most valuable clients waiting. Here are several methods for automatically prioritising talks in Comm100 Live Chat:

Pre-Chat survey - Before routing your clients to an agent, you may have them fill out a quick survey (or just a handful of fields) so the agent understands how important that customer and their inquiry are right away.

Segmentation enables you to separate your visitors based on specific rules such as geography, purchase history, status (e.g., VIP), and the page they are on. When the client contacts you, a tag is assigned to their question so that agents are made visibly aware of the situation before the discussion even begins.

Routing enables you to route visitors directly to an agent or department, either manually or automatically using custom criteria. This ensures that your clients always talk with the representative best suited to their needs.

Screening

Because spam is omnipresent, you need a live chat platform that can detect and eliminate it all. With: Comm100 can quickly discern the excellent from the bad.

Visitors that you've previously validated as spam can be blocked from interacting with you on live chat in the agent interface.

Visitor SSO - Visitor Single Sign-On - allows you to control who has access to your live chat. Non-logged in visitors, for example, might be required to complete a pre-chat survey before speaking, but logged in clients are sent directly to an agent.

Reporting

To solve the issues caused by higher conversation traffic, you must first establish when the volume is at its height and agents are the busiest. Understanding your conversation traffic trends can let you manage your resources appropriately.

Your chat platform should include reporting to assist with this. When dealing with high volume, consider the following reports:

Chat volume report - displays the overall number of talks, as well as the acceptance rate and chats ignored or declined by agents. You'll want to examine this closely throughout time, down to the hour. When you know when your conversation volume is at its height, you may allocate more agents to that period and less to when it is at its lowest.

Workload reports show you how much time your agents spend speaking in comparison to their available hours. If it’s too low at times, you may need to schedule more agents to this period so your queue doesn’t get too long.

Improving Speed and Efficiency

While you should never sacrifice quality for speed, during times like this, you must guarantee that your agents are operating as efficiently as possible. Here are two critical tools that your agents may utilise to rapidly yet properly handle issues.

Conclusion

If your customer care staff is currently seeing a large volume of interactions from clients, don't expect this to change anytime soon! There is no need to worry or hire a large number of customer care professionals. Comm100's Live Chat platform is designed to handle the peaks and valleys of customer assistance while keeping operating expenses to a minimal (and yes, your agents may use it remotely!).