Customer Engagement Technology - Online Chat
Tuesday, Jan 08, 2019
Try your best to consider all the UX aspects in your online portal. However, its inevitable that you will need to consider utilizing a chat component on your website. Customers prefer to ask instead of searching over and over again for a specific piece of information.
Basically, most people prefer to chat online, or even text, instead of talking on the phone. But as messaging apps became increasingly popular such as Facebook Messenger, people would prefer to use the same messaging channels they are comfortable with. We can definitely be sure that this is why Facebook is such a key player here. Check the below chart according to some surveys and studies have been done recently:
This will help your customers in finding the needed information as soon as possible. But the question here: Do you have agents to reply to the online customers 24x7?
Online portals are, by default, available all the time for your users. Accordingly, the chat feature has to be available all the time as well. To cover 24 hours per day means you need a minimum of three employees or agents available for chatting with customers. Furthermore, you can't leave the customers unattended during the weekend! These are extra 48 hours you need to cover by adding one more agent. The total would be a minimum of four employees.
This is assuming one employee will cover all active chatting sessions. But do you think the agent will be able to cover peak times? Every agent will be able to cover a maximum of three active, concurrent sessions. Hence, you will have to increase the number of agents as you grow your business and the number of your concurrent online customers increase.
Definitely this is expensive business model that unsuitable to support your business growth on ongoing basis. The solution always lies in technology. Today's digital world enables you to replace manpower with trendy and cutting-edge technologies.
The ideal scenario is to be able to automatically deliver straight forward answers to your customer questions without any human intervention. For that, you will need a technology that acts as an IVR "Interactive Voice Response". Call centers had already encountered the same issues and had resorted to IVR to answer and direct customers automatically. In call centers, eventually, there is a path to direct a phone call to one of the live human agents in case customers didn't find an answer of their inquiries using the automatic response.
This is exactly what you need to consider when adding a Chat component to your online business. The solution to the above issues is the Chat-Bot.
Please refer to the other blog post exploring Chat-Bot features here.
Comments
No comments yet
You must login to add your comment.