An industry may have multiple players competing for market share, but the ones most likely to come out on top are the ones with superior customer support.
At the frontline of superior customer experience are the people who interact with your customers on a daily basis. This includes your sales, marketing, and customer service representatives. Support personnel such as grievance officers, call center executives, and live chat agents are crucial to customer experience. Additionally, in today’s digital world where 75% of customers prefer live chat to other channels for communication, businesses must train live chat agents to rise to the demands of customers.
Who is a Live Chat Agent?
A live chat agent is one who engages with customers via a company’s live chat software to answer customer questions and resolve issues. Even if your live chat software comes equipped with the best automated virtual agents, there are certain grievances that require human intervention. This is where a live chat agent comes into play.
Live chat agents need to be effective communicators, quick typists, efficient multi-taskers, and know their way around a computer as well as your business. While different industries have different response times, most businesses respond to a live chat in 47 seconds. The global average for a live chat duration is 10 minutes and 55 seconds. The best customer service agents are those who aim to beat this global benchmark while effectively solving customer problems.
What Role Do Live Chat Agents Play in Your Business?
Essentially, a live chat agent talks to and answers customer questions. However, their role is much more nuanced than that. To understand the importance of a live chat agent in your business, let’s look at some of their responsibilities:
The primary responsibility of a live chat agent is to respond to customer questions quickly and effectively. Since communication on online chat channels can often be ambiguous, a good live chat agent needs to answer queries with clarity. An agent who communicates poorly can frustrate customers and leave them more confused than before.
- Proactively Engage with the Audience
Some customers need encouragement to chat. This is why live chat agents need to be proactive communicators. A chat service agent should identify opportunities to reach out and ask the right questions, identify unique ways to solve problems and offer tailored support. If your business offers self-service options, an agent should be able to provide guidance to customers to do things themselves without jumping to solve the issue. The key is to listen and engage proactively.
- Drive Meaningful Conversations
The difference between an automated live chat software and a chat service with customer service agents is the human touch. A live chat agent must set the right tone of the conversation with warm, helpful responses rather than monosyllabic answers. For instance, if a customer asks whether an alternative product is available, rather than a “Yes” or a “No” response, a good live agent should provide additional details like price, possible discounts, and package deals. And surprise them with discount codes and vouchers wherever possible!
- Utilize Knowledge of Customer Pain Points
A smart customer service agent will be able to identify common trigger points for customer issues based on past conversations. They should also be able to offer corresponding solutions that work best. It is a live chat agent’s responsibility to draw from historic experiences, get to the bottom of issues, and provide meaningful solutions to customers without going back and forth.
- Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Products
An online chat can also effectively double-up as a sales channel. A good customer service representative should tap into potential upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Based on customer data points, a live chat agent should be able to plug in additional products at the right time. For instance, a customer whose query has just been addressed is likely to be feeling positive about the business. This is a good time for an agent to suggest a complementary product or service as part of the natural conversation flow without seeming pushy.
Live chat agents have an ear to the ground when it comes to customer grievances. An agent who talks regularly to different customers will be cued into all key issues. Agents can then use all this information to curate customer FAQs which can be part of a knowledge base. They can also create an effective solutions strategy for other agents to follow in the future.
- Coordinate Updates and Improvements
Another advantage that live chat agents have is their insight into customer perception on products and services. A smart business would use this intel to improve business efficiency. Live chat agents can communicate customer feedback to other teams, including the technology, product, marketing and sales teams.
- Optimize for Support Metrics?
While live chat agents must think on their feet and resolve customer questions effectively, it is also important to align with the support function’s goals. This means that an agent must understand key support KPIs and provide solutions that optimize for the best results. Live chat software provides key metrics such as first response time, resolution rate, etc. to determine the success rate of support.
Key Skills That Live Chat Agents Must Possess
Now that you have a clear picture of what a live chat agent can do for your business, it is up to you to hire the right people for the job. To keep customers happy and satisfied, a chat service agent needs to have certain skills:
The top requirement for a customer service agent is impeccable communication skills. They need to have a good grip on written communication to handle online chat effectively. When hiring live chat agents, make sure they can form clear written sentences, have good grammar and proofing abilities, and a fast typing speed.
While chatting online, agents may have to talk to more than one customer at a time while simultaneously navigating through solutions and troubleshooting problems. This requires pro multitasking skills. A person unable to handle multiple tasks at once may not be a good fit for this role.
A live chat agent’s job is to provide customer support online. This means that being tech-savvy is non-negotiable. An employee in this role needs to be able to navigate live chat software with ease, leverage customer data effectively to provide meaningful support, and do all of this fast.
From upgraded software, new products and services, and evolving customer queries, a customer service representative needs to be able to adapt to change quickly. They must be willing to learn and upgrade their skills to provide quality service.
Businesses can lose as much as $62 billion a year because of poor customer service. A live chat agent can prevent this. When it looks like a customer is about to drop off, an agent needs to be able to think quickly to motivate the customer to stay. Providing discounts and offers that the customer just can’t refuse is a skill they will need to have.
Customers needed to be treated like royalty. Even if they ask the same question repeatedly or take time to understand a response, a live agent needs to patiently sort through them. Empathy and patience are essential skills for live chat agents.
The primary responsibility of a live chat agent is to solve customer issues. If an agent is unable to effectively solve a customer’s problem, they should be willing to refer them to another teammate who is likely to have better success. There is no room to solely prioritize personal performance.
Having industry knowledge is a huge plus for a live chat agent. Someone who understands industry-wide trends can provide better explanations. For instance, a live chat agent for a car dealership who is aware of automobile trends will be able to explain evolving emission standards to customers and relate that to their product.
Choose the Right Live Chat Software
Agents are only as good as the data and software you provide them with. This is why you must choose your live chat software with careful consideration for your business. Good live chat software for the best customer support must:
- Be easy to use and adapt to your business.
- Have strong AI-backing and automation to answer routine questions.
- Support your business when agents are not available.
- Provide you with in-built features like quick toggling, visitor details, and a unified platform to support productivity.
- Be scalable to your needs.
- Offer quick chat routing, canned responses, and smart triggers.
- Provide useful data assistance to your customer service teams to improve success rates.
4 life-saving tools that all live chat agents should have on hand.
If you are a live chat agent offering customer service assistance or generating leads via chat, there are a couple of tools that can amplify your effort. Such as:
Freshchat provides a unified platform to answer multiple customer questions on different channels at the same time, on a single screen. With our software, engage with customers on your website, app, WhatsApp, Facebook, Apple Business Chat, Line at once. Personalize responses by choosing one of more than 33 languages, send images, videos, or GIFs, or help them with self-service options.
Customer service agents are humans and deserve a break from time to time. However, that doesn’t mean that your customer service should take a hit. With Freshchat’s AI-powered Freddy Chatbot, provide 24/7 assistance to your customers. Freddy can answer common customer questions without human intervention or direct a conversation to a free agent. Our smart tech will help you build custom flows, send proactive texts based on quality triggers, and suggest useful articles from the knowledge base to save agent time and effort.
- Agent Productivity Features
Apart from automated workflow through Freshchat’s IntelliAssign and a unified chat platform, Freshchat also provides chat prioritization based on response due, canned responses with predefined answers to FAQs, bulk actions like edit or resolve for multiple conversations, and deep visitor intel. Freshchat will provide your agents with everything they need to bring their A service game.
Freshchat IntelliAssign
Freshchat is a live chat software that believes in the power of data to transform the customer experience. Apart from providing the best data points for visitors, our software will also let you access detailed visual reports of your individual live chat agents and your team. Using this real-time dashboard, you can track productivity metrics, conversation trends, and set business-specific metrics to ensure the best customer support.
Freshchat data-driven reports
With Freshchat, provide real-time responses to your customers using a chat service that understands intent and supports your live chat agents with all the tools needed to put on their chat service super capes!
