Gone are the days of simplistic customer service flowcharts, splitting off direct inquiries to either the Sales or Service department. Today’s leading live chat platforms are set up to meet the unique needs of your organization, routing chats based on any criteria you can imagine.
Not sure where to start? With these three live help process tools, you can design the ideal workflow for your team and get your customers the answers they need faster than ever before.
Defining Customer Groups
Thanks to state-of-the-art visitor monitoring technology, today’s live chat agents have a full picture of every website visitor at their fingertips—survey answers, chat history, geolocation, and more. Take this intel to the next level by defining rules that assign visitors to a particular customer group, either upon visiting a certain webpage, after submitting a chat request, or something else entirely. And with behavior-based rules, if customers’ habits change, their group changes, too, giving agents an automatically updated and instant snapshot of every website visitor – including what they’ve viewed, how they got to your site and what they’ve chatted about before. With smart customer group segmentation, your agents will know the answer before the customer even asks the question.
Setting Up Agent Tiers
Likewise, you can organize your agents by setting up customer service tiers to control the flow of chats to different reps or groups of reps. Exceptional live chat platforms allow you to define several different levels for distributing users. Basic question? Send it to a Tier 1 agent. Complex issue? You probably want Tier 3 to troubleshoot. Tiers facilitate skill-based routing to get the right chat to the right agent and serve as overflow valves to keep up when agents are unavailable. Whether you’re auto-routing traffic in certain areas to a specific group of agents or visitors have the power to choose, you can easily set up your live chat workflow to mirror your organization’s layout.
Routing Chats Effectively
With the appropriate groups and tiers in place, you can easily set up workflows that work optimally for your organization. Auto-routing chats efficiently distribute requests to agents based on easily defined rules and algorithms. Alternatively, queueing chats allows agents to manually accept engagement requests, maximizing their flexibility and control.
Further streamline your workflows by investing in a live chat platform that makes it easy for agents to stay nimble and use their time wisely. For example, automatic workflows are great, except when the agent to “pick up” the chat isn’t the right one to finish it. Look for live help software that allows you to manually and automatically transfer chats to a specific agent or anyone in a pre-defined group of agents (Tier 2 support reps, for instance). And for chats that have gone dormant, you’ll want a platform that will automatically close the chat window and offer customized warnings before it happens. Now that’s efficient service – for customers and agents alike.