The Key Elements Your Staff Need for Great Live Chat

Live chat is excellent for any website, but behind any great tool is a great customer service agent that has all the key elements. What do they need?

As customers are interacting with businesses via online chat or social media more these days, it is much more essential than ever to have customer service agents who know what they are doing. Learning how to set up live chat on website pages is the first step of a much richer tapestry and is a great way to provide quick and convenient responses, but before all this, you need customer service staff with the right selection of skills. What are some of the most important elements that comprise a great selection of staff?

Great Writing Skills

Live chats involve customer service agents typing responses, so naturally, writing is the key component of communication with any customer. An effective customer service agent should understand the different aspects of writing, such as the choice of words, the style, or the tone of voice.

Customers are going to communicate in certain ways, with unique methods of writing that are unique to them. One of the most important lessons for customer service agents is to let the customer dictate the tone of the conversation, not the agent, so the agent can be professional, but also keep the flow of the conversation formal without using complex vocabulary.

Multitasking

Live chat is a way for customer service agents to handle multiple customers at the same time so it stands to reason that multitasking should be a vital skill for any customer service agent. To be effective at multitasking, customer service agents need to get to the root of any customer request instantly.

They need to know how to extract vital information while simultaneously solving the problem and that is in addition to following vital protocols and navigating other software packages at the same time!

Being a Subject Matter Expert

One of the most common complaints from customer service calls involves being given the wrong information. When a customer is given incorrect information, this increases their frustrations but also means they will have to come back to the business to get the right information, all of the while, this is adding fuel to the fire that could result in a very angry customer.

A live chat agent needs knowledge of the process to help customers at whatever point they are at in the business, whether they're about to make a purchase or need to make a complaint. From pre-sales to aftercare, when an agent is an expert in their field, they can handle the conversation and improve the customer experience as a result.

Memorization Skills

Live chat can be long drawn out affairs, which can be due to the customer asking a lot of questions, but it can also be down to the customer service agent not being able to get the salient points across or struggling to find parts of the conversation to guide the queries along.

Live chat agents also need to handle multiple customers at the same time, so having a system in which to memorise and adapt to a discussion is essential.

Great Customer Support Etiquette

One of the benefits of live chat is the potential to completely remove any potential for misinterpretation. However, customer service agents can still come across as rude and condescending. A whopping 42% of consumers will change brands because they have encountered unhelpful staff.

Live chat provides a number of benefits for customer service agents, especially as agents have the luxury to craft responses, however, it is important to display etiquette and manners as this will build a stronger rapport. Politeness, addressing customers by their name, showing respect, and being professional are simple things that should not be forgotten about during live chat.

Emotional Intelligence

One of the hardest aspects of incorporating live chat is that you are relying on words to put across and interpret messages. Agents will interact with a range of personalities and a wide variety of requests.

Without hearing somebody's voice it can be difficult to identify how they are feeling. Emotional intelligence involves listening out for emotional cues from a customer and adapting responses appropriately.

Resolving the Issue in Good Time

40 seconds is how long it takes on average for a customer agent to answer a request. Customers will always want a quick response and need to be engaged immediately, which can only make them frustrated if they don't feel like they are being listened to.

Minimising response times are essential, while also ensuring that you can keep customers in the loop while you are looking for more information. Having that time sensitivity to understand whether your responses are quick or not will make for a far better experience.

Live chat is an excellent addition to any website, but behind any great tool is a great customer service agent that has all the key elements.