There’s a science to customer conversations. It may not be rocket science, but knowing what the customer is hoping to accomplish by talking to you—through live chat customer support, phone calls, or your chat widget—has an impact on the information and assistance you provide. This is especially true for web-based live chat or agent live chats.
Fortunately, there are 3 common types of live chat that can be planned for and staffed. This makes it a lot easier to build your live chat team to meet your specific needs and objectives to ensure customer satisfaction.
Live Chat Best Practice: While the personnel requirements for each type of chat may vary, a well-formed live chat service team still maintains a baseline requirement for qualities like courteousness and the ability to properly represent the brand and its voice.
Use this quick guide to the 3 primary types of live chat conversations to plan your team and live chat strategy:
Live Chat Type 1: Informational
The first and most basic live chat type is as simple as providing information and answering the questions of your site visitors. This type of live chat is oriented towards providing objective, information that your site visitors can use to make a decision (“What is the length of the warranty on these plasma televisions?”) or to take an action (“How do I provide a different shipping and billing address for my order?”).
This type of live chat, similarly, has the most basic of personnel requirements. Typically, the chat personnel have the resources and standard responses to handle the most common questions. More complex or uncommon questions can be redirected to a more specialized agent as needed. This type of chat is also well-suited for administrative assistants and other staff whose primary responsibility leaves them the freedom to handle basic live chats.
Informational Live Chat Agents:
- Should be provided with a list of common questions and answers
- Should be well-versed in website functionality and company policy
- Should have access to product specifications
Live Chat Type 2: Sales
There is a point in many live chats where information gathering changes to requesting recommendations. That’s when the discussion becomes a sales live chat. If this happens frequently on your site, you need to have live chat agents that are focused and trained on sales chats.
A sales live chat agent will have all the information that an informational chat agent does but will also have an innate talent or the training to learn the needs of a prospect and help them choose the best product for their situation.
Live Chat Best Practice: Many companies that require sales live chat agents will have their regular sales team handle live chats when they’re otherwise unoccupied.
Ideally, sales chat agents will also have ready access or knowledge of product comparison information. This kind of data is critical to helping customers choose the right product and ensure their ongoing satisfaction afterward.
Sales live chat agents should also have knowledge of current and upcoming promotions so that they can best help guide a customer to a paramount buying experience. Helping your customer find a great product with a promotional price is a fantastic way to create happy customers and increase sales conversion ratios.
Sales Live Chat Agents:
- Should have access to the same information as informational chat agents
- Should have access to product comparison information
- Should have access to current and upcoming promotions
- Should have the ability to understand and develop rapport with customers
Live Chat Type 3: Customer Service
The final type of live chat focuses on previous and current customers. Customer service live chats emphasize helping those customers – usually to solve a problem they’ve had with their purchase. Handling these conversations, which can frequently be difficult and occasionally even heated, requires a specialty live chat agent.
A customer service live chat agent will typically have access to the most possible information – everything an informational and sales live chat agent has, plus additional information like customer and order records. On top of that, customer service live chat agents should be empowered to award (or at least request) refunds and authorize returns.
More important than having the right information available, a customer service agent needs to have the right temperament to help a frustrated customer through a vexing situation and bring the matter to a satisfying close. Because each request could take a long time to resolve and response times for each customer need to be the utmost efficient, it’s best if your customer service chat agents are focused on customer service only so that their attention does not need to be divided.
Customer Service Live Chat Agents:
- Should have access to the same information as informational and sales chat agents
- Should have access to customer and order records
- Should have the ability to authorize/request refunds and returns
- Should have the ability to manage difficult situations and customers
Build Your Live Chat Team to Suit Your Needs
While there are 3 types of live chat, that doesn’t mean you have to staff 3 different types of agents. It’s important to start by identifying the types of live chats you are most likely to handle and build your team to meet those needs.
If a sales or customer service live chat is going to be a rare exception to the normal informational chat, then it’s probably not necessary to have a dedicated sales/customer service live chat agent. Just make sure that your informational chat agents can escalate or bring in someone to help with those more complex issues.
Building the right live chat team is just a matter of understanding what kinds of chats you’ll have and then arranging for the right people to handle each type.
