20 Tips For Successful Chat and Email Implementations, And Key Omnichannel Facts
March 16, 2018
Recently, I presented a workshop at our customer conference CX Summit, where I shared insights on how to successfully implement your chat and email features. I thought you would enjoy if I shared them with you as well. Here are 20 tips for chat and email, and a few industry omnichannel facts to keep in mind for implementation:
1. Strategically place your live chat button in a consistent accessible location such as the upper-right corner
2. Issue personal chat invitation leveraging web analytics to determine when to engage and offer chat invitation
3. Check omnichannel history of returning visitors to avoid asking repetitive questions
4. Use canned messages to avoid typos and improve AHT
5. Accept chat requests automatically
6. Setup personalized greetings, wait, and goodbye messages
7. Use chat transfer to agent or skill to escalate issues or find the best resource to help customers
8. Don’t overload your omnichannel agents by limiting the number of concurrent chat interactions
9. Provide agents visitor behavior analysis such as real-time and historical browsing behavior on your website
10. Route, report, and monitor your email interactions such as “Calls With Five9 Email”
11. Use canned messages to respond to email interactions to improve AHT and reduce typos
12. Re-queue a customer chat if the agent doesn’t reply with the first message within a configurable timeframe
13. Send chat transcripts to customers after chat interactions, or allow them to print out the chat conversation after chat interaction
14. Auto-populate chat pre-survey fields such as name, email, and question within authenticated web pages
15. Omnichannel is as much a mindset as a toolset
16. Don’t try to do it all at once, start simple
17. Phase your chat and email rollout to a small group of agents
18. Omnichannel shopping: 20% shop in the bathroom. 10% shop under the influence. 20% shop in the car
19. Customers with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain on average 89% of their customers compared to 33% of customers with weak omnichannel strategies
20. Smartphones influence more than 28% of US retail sales
If you’d like to join my next workshop, register for our CX Summit West.
