Effective training of live chat agents is one of the most important aspects of successful customer service. While communicating with customers your agents represent your brand and the success of your business depends on the impression they make. Besides excellent product knowledge it is important to use live chat software properly and possess chat-handling and communication skills.
Before delving into live chat agents training topic, let’s answer the question: "Why live chat agents training is important?" There are several answers to this question:
- Your agents get the right soft skills for efficient assistance on live chat.
- Your agents improve their technical proficiency and get knowledge about your product.
- Your agents learn how to deal with customer emotions and handle complicated customers.
- Your agents master the techniques of maintaining positive interactions and avoiding misunderstandings.
Help develop chat-handling skills
Chat-handling skills are essential for any agent. They include:
- Communication skills
- Fast response and resolution time
- Problem solving skills
- Empathy
- Multitasking skills
- Industry expertise
- Blind typing
- Familiarity with live chat software
Live chat agents represent your brand, so everything should be perfect, starting with grammar and spelling and finishing with problem-solving communication. It is necessary to remain calm in complicated situations and be well-versed in identifying the root of issues quickly.
Provide comprehensive product training
Comprehensive knowledge of your products or services is necessary for live chat agents to successfully solve customer issues and be your brand ambassadors. Here are the key recommendations for improving their product knowledge:
- Provide a detailed knowledge base and user manual to refer to.
- Give access to the chat conversations other agents had with your customers.
- Share chat transcripts containing feedback and recommendations which were sent to other agents during their training sessions.
- Conduct mock chats to improve their communication and problem-solving skills.
- Organize team building events and brainstorming sessions, where your team members both experienced and new ones can know each other better, share their knowledge and new ideas.
Ensure live chat software is used to its full extent
Live chat software provides a wide range of features which are helpful during live chat interactions with customers. These features include:
- Agent apps: desktop, browser and mobile
- Canned responses
- Hot keys
- Chat transfer
- Real time visitor monitoring
- Additional information about visitors
- Text editing and messages deleting
- File transfer
- Images preview
- Snipping tool
- Chats auto acceptance
- Automated closing of inactive chats
- Putting chat rooms with new messages at the top
- Proactive chat invitations
- Geo location map
- IP blocking
- Spell-checker
- Customizable notifications
Comprehensive knowledge of live chat tool functionality significantly facilitates agent’s workflow and helps deliver first-class customer service.
Supervise chats and track progress
While training it is important to have the ability to monitor chats and join them whenever it is necessary to help in a complicated situation. With Provide Support live chat service you have various useful tools to make the training process very pleasant and productive. These tools include:
- Live chat agents monitoring
- An ability to join chats with a click
- Flexible permissions settings
- Forced logout feature
- Chat transcripts viewer
- Detailed agents stats
Live chat statistics will show how efficient your agents are, how fast they accept chats, how many they miss and customer satisfaction rate. This information is useful to track their progress and give your recommendations.
Focus on customer experience
With Provide Support live chat software, you have everything you need to train your agents to provide memorable customer service. However, you need to remember that the world of customer service is constantly evolving, and customer expectations change. Thus, you need to regularly review and update your best practices to follow the latest trends in customer service.
With Provide Support live chat software, you have everything you need to train your agents to provide memorable customer service. However, you need to remember that the world of customer service is constantly evolving, and customer expectations change. Thus, you need to regularly review and update your best practices to follow the latest trends in customer service.
