In the shift toward digital customer care, chat is getting a lot of attention. ... shifting more voice calls to chat and
Chat Channel Expansion
How to Shift from Voice to Chat with Success
In the shift toward digital customer care, chat is getting a lot of attention. More and more companies have adopted chat as a way to engage customers in digital channels, in response to consumers’ growing appetite for this type of interaction. According to Forrester Research, Inc., chat usage rates have risen steadily in recent years, from 38 percent in 2009 to 65 percent in 2015.1,2 Yet, while some companies have enjoyed great success in transitioning customers to chat, many are disappointed with the relatively small impact chat has made on their customer experience operations.
Analyst firm Gartner explains the typical progression of innovation in their Hype Cycle (see Figure 1), where they define the “Trough of Disillusionment” as, “Inevitably, impatience for results begins to replace the original excitement about potential value. Problems with performance, slower-than-expected adoption or a failure to deliver financial returns in the time anticipated all lead to missed expectations, and disillusionment sets in.”3 Figure 1: The Hype Cycle
Source: Gartner, Understanding Gartner’s Hype Cycles, 2 July 2013 Refreshed 4 January 2017
When it comes to chat, many business leaders would agree that they’re floundering in the trough and need a way out. This report offers a step in that direction, by helping business leaders answer the question, “Why isn’t chat working for us?,” based on our own best practices and observations we’ve made when troubleshooting chat operations at leading companies around the world.
The Great Chat Reboot: Vaulting Out of the Trough If your chat program has been disappointing, you can respond in one of two ways. The first is to abandon your ambitions for delivering an exceptional chat experience, and hope that you can still attempt to deliver a great digital experience without chat. The second way is to do a “hard reboot” on chat, casting aside your old approach and taking another look at how to better align your operation with customer preferences and expectations so you can succeed in shifting more voice calls to chat and really make chat the gateway to digital customer care at your company. The good news is that now is the perfect time for a reset of your approach to chat. Companies who haven’t seen success with chat can learn from companies whose chat operations have excelled. And, because Convergys directly supports many of these chat leaders, we are in a unique position to advise on the key success factors for a healthy chat operation. Six of the most important factors are summarized for you here. So, aim high and get ready to vault out of the trough of disillusionment, by making these six elements the core of your chat improvement plan. If you haven’t yet deployed chat, understanding these six elements will help you avoid the trough altogether.
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Key Success Factors
for Making Chat a More Significant Channel
Ensure that chat, when offered, can deliver successful resolutions. As more and more customer support queries shift from voice to self-service, company leaders often worry about maintaining the high resolution rates that customers have come to expect from costly, time-consuming voice-assisted service. So, they deploy chat without a clear plan for resolution, fearing that chat resolution is difficult to achieve, or even measure. It’s time to drop this fear. You can measure chat resolution—and part of your chat reboot should be to make it a top priority to understand how you can. First, take time to re-examine what kind of customer experience you hope to deliver via chat. Many clients fail to acknowledge that the effort and journey of the customer are distinctly different from voice engagement. If you’re going to allow customers to ask virtually any question via chat, you must ensure that you have the tools and workflows in place that will guide your support agents to low effort, high resolution customer chat interactions. Second, map out your key use cases in the form of a customer journey map. Once you’ve ensured that the end-to-end transaction can be supported successfully, you can offer chat support with confidence.
You can measure chat resolution—and part of your chat reboot should be to make it a top priority to understand how you can.
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Recognize that chats can vary in length and complexity, and can’t be managed generically. All chats are not created equal. Today, companies are using chat for: 1. general customer service inquiries, 2. higher-complexity customer service inquiries, 3. technical support, 4. sales (cross-selling and upselling), 5. retention efforts, 6. collections, and more. Problems arise when a company identifies a generic customer experience strategy for chat, but aims to handle a breadth of chat types. Each chat type requires its own unique rules, workflows, and approach to management, training, and coaching. Take an example of a technical support chat that includes co-browse and other kinds of advanced troubleshooting between the agent and the customer. These types of interactions can last thirty minutes or more, compared to a one-minute chat for a simple customer service query. The longer, more complex chat has its own kind of challenges, and requires agents to have a certain set of tools and abilities in order to achieve resolution. An agent will, therefore, need to be coached on how to deliver an outstanding technical support interaction for that particular product. Generic feedback and coaching to the agent on a chat of this level of complexity is not enough.
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Have a plan for applying text analytics and quality insights to improve chat interactions. A good chat program will need a strong analytics function at its core. Data mining and analytics are required to learn what customers like and dislike, where they struggle, and where they succeed in their journeys. Analytics expertise enables a chat operation to continuously identify opportunities for improving the design of the customer journey, to diagnose root causes of chat dissatisfaction, improve first contact resolution rates, and increase agent productivity. An example of using analytics to improve chat interaction is by identifying commonly asked questions and then creating productivity shortcuts for agents, such as boilerplate responses that are carefully written so that they don’t sound canned.
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Agents are the point of failure in most chat programs. Choose your chat agents wisely. Much of the success of your chat program depends on having the right agents for the job. Quite simply, excellent chat agents create excellent customer experiences and drive higher adoption rates for chat. Many companies staff their chat channel with successful voice agents, under the assumption that strong product knowledge and experience on the front lines will translate well from voice to chat. This approach has its merits, but overlooks the fundamental need to build a team that is adept at living in the digital realm of customer engagement. Don’t just move your voice agents to chat without the right assessment and training and support processes. Even better, consider hiring directly into digital support programs to attract the best talent. Digital care interactions require individuals who are already engaged in the digital world in their daily lives. And, recruiting should be about assessing candidates for specific skills like digital fluency, ability to multitask in digital environments, engagement in social media culture, good typing and grammar skills, as well as ability to adjust communication style to the nuances of different audiences and context. It’s equally important to develop team leaders who know how to lead agents toward success. This means having management that understands how to train, coach, and nurture these agents, for ongoing performance assessment, improvement plans, feedback, and skills development. Ensure your quality process and coaching practices are unique to chat, and emphasize the importance of chat specific behaviors that agents must demonstrate to ensure high CX and resolution rates.
Don’t just move your voice agents to chat without the right assessment and training and support processes. Even better, consider hiring directly into digital support programs to attract the best talent.
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It’s not about the platform. You need a strategy for chat. In many cases, companies undergo a protracted process to choose a chat platform, deploy it, and, when it fails to become a significant channel, they might consider switching platforms as a way to encourage improvement. But, switching platforms alone isn’t going to turn a struggling chat program into a winner, because there just is not a lot of variance in core functionality among chat technology vendors. Technology is but one piece of the puzzle, and the chat technology platforms that deliver value are the ones that are optimized to fit within a well-thought-out chat strategy. In the absence of strategy, no platform will be a silver bullet.
Your chat strategy isn’t something that can be put together in one session, but you can go a long way toward shaping your strategy by asking the right questions. Here are some that we recommend. Most companies who have tried and failed with their chat operations can usually trace failures back to incomplete answers to some of these important questions: 1. How do you envision the end-to-end customer journey you wish to facilitate? 2. Do you want to enable a discrete customer chat journey or will it be part of a broader customer engagement journey, such as offering chat as a natural escalation point after an unsuccessful virtual agent interaction? 3. How will you measure success? 4. What existing data do you have on your customers, and how will you use that data to inform your planning and execution, workflow, and training for chat operations? 5. How will your existing contact center processes need to be modified in order to enable success with chat? 6. How will you hire and train for chat, knowing that it is very different than voice? 7. How will you design the end-to-end chat solution? From the placement of the chat option on the screen to the types of inquiries chat should be expected to solve, to optimizing the agent desktop/toolset for superior chat resolution and customer satisfaction. These are just some of the important questions to ask, and a springboard to help you conceive your complete strategy for chat.
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Chat won’t amount to much without scale. If you want chat to be a significant channel, you need to be thinking about scale from the start, and understand that not doing so could jeopardize your momentum. Scaling chat requires specialized expertise, but also vision. Make sure you—or your chat partner— have a plan for scale. A small, in-house chat operation is very different than a large scale program that requires global operating processes and standards specific to chat, to drive not just effectiveness, but efficiency, through concurrency and agent productivity. Companies that operate chat with a small in-house team of agents inevitably run into issues with agent availability. Too often, this results in an “Agent Not Available” message when customers attempt to initiate chat, or the decision to contain chat to a certain span of business hours that the company is able to staff for. But, restricting customers’ access to a preferred channel is very damaging, because the experience of being denied chat even once trains customers to avoid your chat channel rather than frequent it. Lack of vision for scale is a big reason why small chat operations stay small, and never take off like they should. You need a plan for staffing and scheduling capabilities that ensures chat agents are available when customers want to chat. Forcing your chat offering to conform to present-day operational limitations is not a strategic approach to chat. Before your chat reboot, make sure you or your chat partner have a detailed plan for scale.
Summary Customers today expect companies to value their time as they gravitate toward “low friction” digital channels like chat for quicker, easier resolution to their issues. The growing usage for chat over recent years demonstrates that consumers want chat to feature prominently in your digital experience. If chat has yet to become a significant channel at your organization, it’s time to reboot your approach. Compare your current chat operations with these six key success factors and look for areas of deficiency that you can begin to correct. Then move forward to develop a chat improvement plan that adheres to these six elements so you can begin delivering the kind of chat experience that customers will enjoy and eagerly use.
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Turn this insight into results! Convergys offers world-class global chat support operations that consistently deliver high levels of first chat resolution, while bringing insights to optimize chat as part of your overall shift to digital and self-service interactions. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your organization make chat a significant part of your digital customer engagement.
US: +1 800-344-3000 Int’l: +1 513-458-1300 convergys.com
References 1 “Market Overview: Chat Solutions For Customer Service,” Forrester Research, Inc., November 18, 2015. 2 “Your Customers Don’t Want to Call You,” Forrester Research, Inc., February 29, 2016. 3 Gartner, “Understanding Gartner’s Hype Cycles,” Jackie Fenn, Mark Raskino, Betsy Burton, 2 July 2013, refreshed January 4, 2017.
