Starting out with Live Chat

My first blog on the subject of Live Chat was short and sweet, but I hope it got you thinking, (if youâre not already doing so) about your Digital Service strategy (read it here to refresh your memory). It ended on the question of understanding what you want to achieve by building Live Chat capability. Itâs a key question, as only by understanding what you want to achieve can you truly gauge the benefits it hopefully delivers. At O2, the core reason for developing a Live Chat operation was to reduce Voice contacts into our call centres; although later, we also developed Live Chat sales capability to significantly increase online Sales.

Although the Live Chat operation we have running at present has over 1,200 heads, chatting to over 800K customers a month, it actually started out as an initial 5 FTE pilot, back in 2010.

One of the biggest customer grievances Iâve come across in my time involved in Live Chat is when a Chat operation is showing as available, but you make a customer wait an age to connect to an advisor. Although we have a wide spread of demographics using Chat in O2 (itâs not just your millennials) youâd be surprised at how much a customerâs patience is diminished when they are "Waiting" to Chat compared to "Holding" on the phone. I must admit, as a user of Chat (I have to keep an eye on whatâs good or bad elsewhere after all) Iâve been tearing my hair out with a 2 minute wait, where Iâve waited on hold on the phone for over 15 mins and felt more satisfied.

This is important to remember when deploying a Live Chat pilot. Permanent real estate highlighting Chat when not resourced properly will likely lead to frustratingly long wait times, and dissatisfied customers, rather than the significantly higher than voice satisfaction rates that weâve seen at O2 for the last 5 years.

You can fix this by only showing your Chat capability when you have agents available, or by proactively popping up an invite to Chat when you have an agent available. This is the route we went down at O2. We didnât start to look at permanent Chat real estate until we were close to 2 years into deployment. By that point we had significant scale and answered each chat in less than 15 seconds, on average.

Getting your pilot right is key to building a business case, so although customer satisfaction isnât the only KPI to look at (far from it) an improved CX goes a long way to winning most people round.

My next blog will look at what else to consider when building a business case for Chat.

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