The complexity of your product and support requests
Depending on how complex your customer support requests are on an average, you may want to decide how you want to staff your chat support team. If you have customers who often tend to reach out with complex issues and requests, your resolution time per customer would be higher. Therefore, you might want to consider adding more agents to them.
Understanding your chat traffic
When you need more agents to be online, you need to explore and understand the times of the day when you get high volume of requests vs. low volume. Thus, you can break down the chat traffic by hour and estimate the number of agents you need during those hours. Also depending on the geographies you serve to, you need to plan the timezones in which your agents need to be online.
What is the expected experience of your support agents
Again, depending on the complexity of issues your support team currently handles and the volume of conversations, you need to plan the staffing of your chat team. For example, a support agent with 4-5 years of experience may be able to handle several conversations simultaneously, while an agent without prior experience would be able to handle fewer conversations.
Measure, measure, measure
Once you are clear about the number of people you need for your chat support team, it’s time to go ahead and implement. But, while it might seem like the heavy-lifting is done with - the critical component to follow is to continuously measure the effectiveness of your chat support team and take continuous measure to improve it.
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