Want better customer satisfaction and loyalty? Use these 10 metrics to optimize your chat experience.
Live Chat
June 8, 2022
These ten live chat metrics is a powerful tool to measure and improve your live chat performance. Use these ten metrics to identify opportunities to improve the quantity and quality of your customer service.
When customers land on your website, they probably have questions and concerns about doing business with you. When a question or worry pops into the mind of potential customers, you have an opportunity to connect with the potential buyer. While static website content like product descriptions and other pages lay a great foundation, there’s no replacement for having a conversation.
With Live Chat, your employees can easily interact with your customers at scale while providing a personalized experience. That means you get greater customer loyalty. A high customer satisfaction rate means more return buyers and a positive impact on sales.
The foundation of your customer service success with live chat starts with your business goals. For example, you may aim to improve the effectiveness of your customer service agents by decreasing the average wait time by equipping your team with canned responses to common questions.
When you first start offering live chat, pick a handful of metrics to start measuring your performance. After those initial metrics are well integrated into your team, you can continue developing your systems by fully adding additional metrics to realize your chat strategy.
The first live chat metric is focused on measuring the speed of response. In brief, you measure how long it takes your chat agents to respond to a customer’s first message.
The FRP metric is critically important to impact your customers positively. A fast response tells your customers that you value their time. On the other hand, keeping a customer waiting for a long time is likely to hurt your reputation.
The first response time metric is also helpful for management. If FRT responsiveness decreases over time, it may signal that you need more chat agents. It may also indicate that your chat support teams need more support in the form of playbooks, frequently asked questions, and other resources.
The average First Time Response is 15 minutes, so that you can use this timing as a starting point for your organization. In general, the lower this number is, the better the customers’ satisfaction with the service. If the response takes more than the average, it is likely to cause frustration and even negative referrals.
Tracking live chat key metrics becomes truly valuable when you use this data to improve performance. Use these tips to improve your live chat performance over time.
Empower your employees by sharing FRP metrics widely and discussing them at each chat team meeting.
The FRP metric is helpful, but it has limitations. The metric will not tell you the root cause of a falling metric. Start by investigating technology problems that are interfering with service standards. In addition, chat responsiveness may suffer during periods of high volumes.
This live chat performance indicator is a volume measurement. It shows the number of live chat sessions that have been launched. Tracking this metric is helpful over time; it shows the popularity of live chat for service vs. other customer service options like phone and email.
On its own, this live chat metric has limited value. However, it can be made more useful by using the following tips.
A significant drop in the live metric is a warning sign that something is going wrong with your systems. That’s why we suggest monitoring this metric daily in normal conditions. You may want to track it hourly during times of peak usage.
The raw volume of chat conversations only tells you part of the picture. It is crucial to touch base with your live chat staff regularly. Ask them about the most common questions they face. Look for patterns in the questions you face so that you can create better answers and solutions for your chat agents to use.
This live chat metric is adapted from the world of customer service call centers. Unlike the first few live chat metrics, this chat response time metric is different. It is focused on the quality of your staff's customer service. It is not enough to provide a quick answer. The chat experience needs to take the time to answer all customer questions as much as possible.
In general, you want your average resolution time metric to be as low as possible. There is a risk in pressuring customer service staff to work too quickly. It is vital to make sure all of a customer’s concerns and questions are fully resolved and avoid cutting off the session simply to boost your chat performance metrics.
The ART metric is typically measured in minutes for the vast majority of situations. Your ART metric might be days in some highly complex customer service cases.
Before you set an ART metric goal for your company, start by measuring the current performance of your customer support team. You can calculate this live chat metric manually or through a system.
1. Choose your measurement period (i.e., customer service for the most recent month)
2. Tally up the ART for all customer service interactions in the month
3. Average the ART for all of the customer service interactions in the period
For example, if your ART is 35, 60, 52, 70, 48, 55; and your solved tickets are 8, your average First Response Time would be 45,6 minutes. In detail, this calculation would work as follows. 35 + 60 + 52 + 70 + 48 + 55 = 365 / 8 = 45,6
Use the following tips to interpret the ART metric effectively.
As mentioned above, you can expect outliers to the ART metric. Look for cases where agents take much longer than average to resolve the question. For example, you might find that new customer support employees take longer to resolve issues. In that case, the higher ART time is understandable and is likely to decline over time.
On the other hand, keep an eye on the chat load that your experienced chat operators have. If your experienced staff have an excessive workload, customers are more likely to have a bad experience.
This guide is focused on live chat customer service. In reality, your company probably has multiple customer service channels like phone calls, email, and in-person locations. If live chat ART data looks great, it is helpful to compare it to your other support options like the phone center. Ideally, you want to see consistent levels of customer service resolution across all of your key channels.
To become a chat leader, it’s important to convert chat participants into buyers. According to our research, 38% of customers who participate in a live chat session ultimately decide to purchase after receiving excellent support front eh customer service team.
This chat experience metric may be the most valuable metric we have covered. It tells you how effective the chat channel is when producing revenue or leads. Now, let’s look at ways you can help the customer service team convert more chat participants into leads and customers.
Not all chat requests are created equal. For example, compare a chat that starts on your home page with a chat on the checkout page. Generally, it is easier to convert a website visitor to a buyer on certain pages (e.g. a product page).
When you connect your chat platform to a customer data platform, for example, your chat team leaders may find out that one individual agent has an above-average score when it comes to converting visitors to buyers. In that case, reach out to that person and find out what they are doing. Based on what you learn, develop additional training for your staff.
Additional training is not the only way to enhance the chat experience. For example, take a critical look at your chat software. Your current software may not have the capacity to handle the number of inbound chats you are receiving. Or your software may not load in an acceptable time. Switching to a faster chat tool like Arena Live Chat can improve your customer experience almost overnight.
The FCR rate is a critical quality metic. Your customer’s concerns in a single chat session in ideal conditions. It is unrealistic to expect that you will be able to solve 100% of customer complaints or questions on the first attempt. It is wise to set a high bar for this metric to maintain a high level of customer happiness.
Before improving this chat support metric, start by calculating it accurately. To calculate the First Contact Response rate, you must track the number of interactions in a case and the proportion of one-touch resolutions. Track this data for at least one month before you start to make improvements.
Traditionally, contact centers aim for a 70% FCR rate. Reaching this level of success is easier when your chat team has access to extensive resources like proper answers to commonly asked customer questions. If your first contact resolution rate is lower right now, use the following tips to work with chat team staff to make improvements.
Sending a short customer survey with a few simple questions is a great way to gather feedback from your customer base. For example, ask your customers to rate their satisfaction level on a scale of 0 to 10. If the score is below 5, ask a follow-up question about it.
When customers have to wait a long time, they may be more upset when the chat session starts. As a result, a long chat queue can make it more challenging to quickly solve customer questions. Better training and a high-performance chat system can help here.
The CSAT is one of the most popular ways to develop a customer satisfaction rating for customer support. A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures how much your product or service meets or surpasses your customer’s expectations. A short customer satisfaction survey at the end of the live chat session is all you need to achieve this metric.
There are a few popular ways to make improvements. Use these tips to boost your chat quality assurance efforts.
Studying chat transcripts from successful interactions is an excellent way to improve your performance. Look at how your high-performing employees are addressing common customer pain-points. Once you identify these best practices, share them with the rest of your team.
Persistent low CSAT scores serve as a warning that something is wrong in your business. Before creating an action plan, take the time to understand the problem entirely. Look at contact volumes, peak traffic hours, and recent business growth. Your chat staff may be doing their best to help customers but simply lack the resources to serve customers effectively.
NPS might just be one of the best metrics to evaluate customer satisfaction. This metric measures overall customer loyalty, not just the chat experience.
The NPS process is simple. You gather consistent feedback from customers by asking them a single question: On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to other people you know?
Ideally, you want to maximize promoters and minimize the other two categories as much as possible. Use the tips covered elsewhere in this guide to improve your customer experience. Keep in mind that customers can respond negatively to an NPS question for a number of reasons (e.g. upset with product delivery, pricing etc) that have nothing to do with the quality of their chat interaction.
Think about the last time you contacted a company with a question. Did you enjoy waiting for an answer? Even loyal customers hait waiting. That’s why monitoring your average wait time is a crucial metric.
The average chat wait time is usually less than a few minutes. Of course, this metric may look different during your busiest hours when you have a high volume of incoming chats.
There are a few options to improve the average time it takes to respond to customers. Start with examining the resources your chat agents have. Equipping your staff with canned answers, detailed product information, shipping details, and related resources can make a big difference.
While prewritten responses are helpful, they have limitations. You don’t want your customers to feel ignored simply because your chat staff feels pressured to achieve better chat performance benchmarks. This chat metric must be interpreted alongside other metrics such as the NPS and FCR rate.
Increasing the number of chats per month generated from your website is a worthwhile goal to pursue. Most of the time, more chat sessions lead to more sales and more satisfied customers.
Keeping track of this metric is easy because you can easily track the data required. As a starting point, aim for a 1% conversion rate. If your website has 100,000 visitors per month, you should expect to have 1,000 chat sessions per month.
This metric is more valuable when it is read in the context of other metrics. For example, it is crucial to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction (e.g., high NPS rates, high first contact resolution rates, etc.) even as you lift
There are a few techniques you can use to improve this metric.
The right chat technology has an important role to play in lifting this metric. For example, Arena Live Chat is built for speed and usability. Arena can also support a large volume of chat sessions simultaneously.
Chat windows usually start with a message or a question. Experimenting with different questions (e.g., “Do you have any questions?” vs “Do you have a question about our Black Friday sale?”) can increase the number of website visitors who start a chat session
The missed chat metric gives you insight into whether your chat team can keep up with incoming chat requests. A single Live Chat agent can handle approximately 6 to 7 simultaneous conversations if they are relatively simple chat sessions. Once your chat team hits capacity, missed chats will become a problem.
It’s not just a question of workload influencing this metric. You may also face a mismatch between working hours and staff availability. Your website is open 24/7 for business but your chat support team is only available between 9 am to 5 pm.
Therefore, the raw volume of missed chats is only part of the story. It is also important to track when missed chat requests occur. If missed chat sessions occur during regular working hours, use the other techniques mentioned in other parts of this situation.
Improving your performance on this live chat metric can be relatively challenging.
When you have a significant chat volume outside of your usual work hours, give your customers other options. For example, show your customer service email address and invite customers to send a message to your team.
Chat handling time and chat volume are likely to increase when you run sales. In those cases, average response time and missed chats measures may suffer. To avoid this problem, ask more of your employees to work as customer support agents to handle the demand.
You may already have a chat app in place for day-to-day needs. But, what about events like live shopping, livestreams and other virtual events? These events are an exciting way to launch products and bring your community together. In these situations, a different chat solution is needed.
Arena Live Chat is the perfect solution for digital events because your customers can message each other, ask support questions and get to know people better. Try Arena Live Chat today - you can add it to your website in a few minutes. Check out how easy it is to install it in the video below.