Customer service chat has become an increasingly important service channel. According to a recent survey, more than 70% people consider customer service chat to be the best way to communicate with a company or service provider. In other words, people perceive customer service chat as a useful service.
For businesses, a customer service chat is at its best a great way to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction and manage customer service resources more effectively. How can you actually measure the development of these factors?
A key part of using and measuring a customer service chat is by using tags that can be used to thematise customer service converstations. This is especially important information for analysing the use and performance of the customer service chat.
The tags reflect the themes of the customer service contacts
Tags are a kind of customer service chat topic identifiers, just like hashtags in social media communication. The purpose of tags is to illustrate and document the topics of conversations that customer service agents have with customers.
Common tags in a customer service chat might include:
– customer enquity
– sales
– lead
– complaint
– appointment.
Why should all customer service conversations be tagged?
Analysing online conversations provides valuable information for your business. This information can then be used to better meet customer needs and also to understand the effectiveness of the customer service chat as part of the sales process. For example, if 30% of online conversations through a customer service chat result in leads, it is easy to monitor the evolution of this ratio.
Without tags the use of customer service chat is a guesswork exercise.
Let’s consider this in terms of an example. Your customer service team is going through the results and figures for the past month. The number of chat conversations increased by 20%. But why? This is a good question. Tagging chat conversations makes it easier to measure the performance of your customer service chat.
If this increase in chat conversations is due to, for example, increased sales conversations, then there is reason to celebrate at your monthly meeting. If, on the other hand, it’s complaints, the monthly meeting can be used to work out what are some common issues customers are making complaints on. In any case, it is important to understand the value of measurability when it comes to customer service chat.
4 tips for making the most of your customer service chat tags
1. L1. List the most common service situations and types (e.g. sales, complaints, appointments, billing, customer feedback). Create tags based on these. It is important to do this together with your customer service or sales staff. They have the best knowledge of customer situations and will be more motivated to commit to using tags if they find them useful.
2. In cooperation with everyone that uses the customer service chat come to an agreement on a common set of rules for using tags. Determine also what possible follow-up actions will be triggered by the discussions on a given topic. For example, if a customer requests to contact a salesperson in the chat, the ”lead” of the customer service chat and the content of said chat will be sent directly to the sales email along with the customers contact information.
3. Ensure that tags are being used in all customer service conversations. This will ensure you collect sufficient data on the conversations.
4. Remember to update the tags regularly. If, for example, some specific theme is missing, it’s often because conversations are occasionally tagged under some tags that closely overlap with the missing theme. This distorts the information available from the customer service chat. Therefore, we recommend reviewing the tags in use regularly with your customer service staff.
Once the tags are in use, how do you use the dashboard to track them? Check out our blog post on managing sales with a dashboard or click on the image below to read more about using the customer service chat.