To help chat agents with multitasking, I’ve compiled here 7 useful tips and techniques that can help them handle their job better. Let’s take a look.
1. Handle less chats when doing live chat support
Multitasking doesn’t have to mean doing too many things at a time. The most common problem with multitasking in live chat support is that chat agents tend to try to deal with too many concurrent chats. This affects their focus and the operators may end up messing up the issues and answers.
An experienced chat operator can only handle around 5 visitors at a time so don’t try to take more. For new and less experienced agents, it’s ideal to receive about 3 incoming chats at a time and raise the bar once they are more proficient with multitasking.
Remember that it’s always better to have a few but well-taken-care-of chat conversations than many but poorly handled ones.
2. Use keyboard shortcut
Speed is of the essence when it comes to multitasking. How fast you can switch between each task determines the quality of your work. Chat agents, therefore, must know the chat tools inside out and have a good grasp of all of its features to aid their job.
To aid the typing speed, chat operators can use keyboard shortcut when moving around the live chat dashboard. Unlike using computer mouse, keyboard shortcut helps agents to react faster when they have to minimize or switch between many chat windows, transfer the chats or execute many other small tasks.
3. Set up sound notification
Some chat agents don’t only handle chats. They have to do many other tasks at the same time like answering phone calls, replying emails or more of other support tasks. The high chance is that they may get caught up in some task and may miss a new reply or a new incoming chat.
Chat agents should, therefore, set up their chat notification properly to stay updated with their many conversations. It’s advisable to use sound alerts for every notification. You can set different sounds for different kinds of alerts for better detection.
For example, to faster differentiate between new messages and new chat requests, you should use different sound notifications for them.
4. Don’t prolong a chat
One chat prolonged results in many chats lost and this won’t look good on your chat volume report. You should set a maximum duration for your support team to handle each chat conversation and they should abide by it strictly.
Some may argue that the duration depends on the difficulty level of each issue and there should be no standard set for it. However, spending too many time trying to resolve only one issue while many other have to wait on hold doesn’t sound very efficient.
For complicated issues that may take hours to finally have a solution, chat agents should instruct customers to create tickets and get back to them by emails later.
5. Build a knowledge base
Being a chat agent means they have to know the product or service inside out. However, this doesn’t mean they can remember or memorize every little details of the product specs, for example. They should have access to a knowledge base where they can look up for most of the common questions and quickly get back to customers with a precise answer.
Likewise, you can also ease the workloads and multitasking pressure on chat agents by encouraging self help from customers. Create a well-organized and helpful FAQ page so that customers can find the solutions to their issues themselves. Even if they can’t, chat agents can easily copy and paste the link to the answer and close the issue quickly.
6. Pre-craft certain responses
Preset responses or canned messages help chat agents reply faster and multitask better. They are preset answers made for some frequently asked questions. Instead of having to type out the full sentence, the agent can use canned messages to respond quicker and have to more time to switch between the existing chat conversations.
You can use canned messages for many questions about product specs like price, color, size, or membership options, shipping policy, payback policy, returns and warranty policy and so on.
7. Put a clear end to the conversations
Some customers tend to go off-topic at the end of the chat with irrelevant conversations and it’s a waste of your time. Therefore, when an issue is completely resolved, make it clear to the customers. Don’t prolong the chat with unnecessary replies back and forth. Let your customers know when the chat has ended to prevent it from lingering on.
However, try to be nice and don’t sound rude to your customers. You should ask them nicely if they have any other related issues with the product/service or not, for example, “Anything I can help you with?” If they don’t, thank them and end the chat session.
Those are a few tips to help chat agents multitask better with live chat support. Do you have any useful tip to share? Feel free to comment below.
If the live chat software you’re using doesn’t provide your chat agents with the tools they need to multitask better, try Subiz live chat today to improve your support team’s efficiency.
