5 Tips For Great Chat Reporting

We all know the familiar saying; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – here are five tips to help with the Chat reporting to make measurement easier:

1. Customer feedback

Take the opportunity at the end of a chat conversation to capture the customer’s view of their chat experience. This is not a revolutionary idea; it’s what every contact center should be doing. The trick is to make sure this information is used to not only provide quantifiable evidence of how agents are performing and highlight areas where improvements are needed but it can also be used to keep agents focussed. If the customer feedback is part of the real time dashboard displayed to agents they will have a continuous awareness of what customers think of them. Furthermore, if this rating forms part of the agent’s KPIs they will want to maintain focus.

2. Capture all the chat details

As the chat session passes through the Automatic Session Distributor (ASD®) and the CRM it will already have several items of information associated with it; which web page it originated from, the IP address and region of where the customer is, the web browser being used etc. All of this can be very useful to other parts of the business for highlighting improvements in web design etc. Reporting on this additional information can bring wider benefits to the business, other than agent evaluation.

3. Identify training opportunities

Chat conversations pass back and forth between customer and agent; however each pass handled by the agent is an added expense. For commercial reasons the chat conversation should be completed quickly and concisely with as few passes as possible. Reporting on the number of passes each chat conversation has encountered will quickly highlight areas where agents need training on how to improve the structure of responses and reduce the number of conversation passes, thereby reducing costs.

4. View the larger picture

Having all the session details is great but combining it with other valuable information can expose oddities you might never have been aware of. For example, are you aware that Agent A takes 20% longer than other agents handling voice calls from female customers but on average resolves chat sessions in fewer conversation passes than all other agents?

5. Assess the agents’ effectiveness

When an agent sends a chat response to the customer, that agent effectively becomes idle as they wait for the customer’s next action; either another comment or termination of the chat. The use of automated canned responses can also lead to the agent becoming temporarily idle. Capturing all instances of idle periods enables the agents’ effectiveness to be measured. Make sure the reporting can provide this effectiveness information, when agents handle multiple chat sessions simultaneously.