Preference of consumers have always changed over time. Companies have been trying too hard to get the attention span of their customers and keep them engaged. This has led to the emergence of new channels through which companies communicate with their customers like social media, phone, email etc.

Latest in this is live Chat option, which has been adopted by a lot of companies to interact with their customers. The importance of this channel can be judged by the fact that one of biggest companies like Amazon, Godaddy are using live chat for providing customer support.

Customers are also fond of live chat which can be seen from a research which states 73% of customers were satisfied with their live chat experience compared to email (51%) and phone (44%).

Live chat performance should be checked regularly as it is becoming one of the most important channels. Below are some live chat metrics which will show you its performance.

1. Total Engaged Chats

This is one of the primary live chat performance metric which shows how many chat sessions you have had with your website visitors. A higher chat volume shows that you have good engagement with your website visitors.

This metric can also be an indicator of rise in the number of issues which your customers are facing. When there’s an issue with your product or website, you would see a surge in number of Chats initiated.

While analyzing if you find that most of the queries are regarding some particular information, then you may include that info in FAQ’s page or make sure that it is visible on the most visited pages. So, you not only need to check the number of chat but also the content of the chats in the chat history.

2. First Response Time

Fast response time is one of the most important feature of a live chat software which makes it an important metric to monitor.

According to a survey, 42% of consumers say that they prefer live chat functions because they don’t have to wait on hold.

With the statistic above, you can understand the value of responding faster to a customer. It plays an important role in providing better customer experience.

A long response time shows to your customer that they are not your priority and would shift their business somewhere else. One reason for delay in response time could be overwhelming amount of chat sessions being handled by a single representative. You may need to hire more people in this case to keep customers happy.

Always keep a check on this metric and setup a guideline for the maximum response time.

3. First Contact Resolution Rate

The main objective of the customers contacting you is the resolution of their query. This is the reason why this metric is one of the most important as it indicates the query Resolution Rate in the first contact.

First contact resolution rate directly affects your customer satisfaction score and hence defines how long a customer will stay with you. One way to increase your first contact resolution rate is to train your executives.

They need to have in-depth product or business knowledge in order to resolve the queries by themselves in the first place.

You may use the post-chat survey forms if your first contact resolution rate is low. It will help you in gaining customer insights and how you can improve it.

4. Escalated Chats

In line with the point mentioned above, if the query is not resolved in first contact and is getting escalated to a senior affects your Customer Satisfaction Score(CSAT). It shows the lack of knowledge of the live chat operator.

It can be product knowledge or soft skills training. Like first contact resolution rate, it is better to keep escalated chats to minimum or else it will hamper customer experience.

5. Lead Generation

One of the most important objectives of every business is lead generation or sales conversions. Live chat does help you in providing better customer support but if used effectively, it can be a great lead generation tool.

Initiating the chats with website visitors who show interest in your services can help in converting visitors to customers. Measuring the leads generated from live chat channel is a metric which can show you its effectiveness.

Monitor the leads regularly and based on the results, you may want to give your executives a soft-skills training.

6. Ratings

As soon as the live chat session ends, you can take the feedback using post-chat survey or may ask for rating about their chat experience. This data gives you invaluable and actionable insights.

You can simply find the outstanding performers of the team and ask others to catch up. It can be used as a great motivation tools for those who are not getting best ratings. This metric will also help you understand how satisfied your customer are with your services. You will also be able to judge how many customers will come back again.

7. Website Visitors to Chats

This metric will help you judge the engagement level of your website. If this data is joined with the “time spent on the website” and then judged can give you valuable insights.

• If the time spent on the website is low and website visitors to chats is also low, then you may need to make changes in your website. It will help you in making website more engaging and website visitors may interact with live chat agents.
• But if the time spent on website is high but website visitors to chat ratio is low, then you need to increase the interaction. You may use auto-trigger option to initiate chat automatically after 10 seconds. It will increase the interaction between your website visitors and live chat agents.

8. Missed Chats to Successful Chats

When you receive more than expected number of website visitors, live chat requests can be overwhelming. This leads to increase in missed chats and hence loosing opportunities.

You may enable the queuing feature or increase the concurrent chats so that visitors may have the idea about the waiting time.

Conclusion

By using the metrics above, you can easily judge the performance of live chat on your website. If you use some other metrics then please share them in comments section below.

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