Do you know that adding a live chat to your website is full of benefits? Live chat can provide assistance to customers, increase conversion, add sales, enhance support, and reveal insights into what your customers are looking for.

On average, businesses that use live chat see a 20% increase in conversions, and buyers are 63% more likely to return to your website just because you made it possible. With this powerful tool, it's important to properly measure the success of your live chat strategy. This means choosing the right live chat metrics can give you an indication of what's going right, and what the best chat teams can do to grow your business faster.

Six Live Chat Metrics to Help You Grow Your Business

Adopting a metrics-based approach helps you stay on top of everything that matters to you and your team. The same goes for live chat, whether you use it for customer support or sales. Keeping these six metrics in mind will ensure that your team is focused on the right things. Below, we group the most important metrics into three groups: speed, quality, and sales.

Service Speed

When offering live chat, speed is critical. Customers don't want to wait for help. In fact, 84% of customers would leave a chat if they did not receive a response within 2 minutes. Measuring service speed can help you understand if you need to put more resources into your live chat effort, or if your team is handling volume effectively.

Average Waiting Time

Average waiting time is the length of time a customer waits to speak to a human, not a bot, after initiating a chat conversation. Keeping it low will ensure that customers don't leave the conversation (or the purchase process). Reducing average wait times is the most important thing you can do to provide a great customer experience through chat.

How to help reduce average waiting time:

• Set an average waiting time. Have a limit of maximum waiting time and add it to your dashboard to monitor any trends. If waiting time increases, consider turning off live chat to help your team catch up, or assigning more agents to your chat queue.

• Multi-tasking agents. Train agents to handle more than one conversation at the same time. Depending on the complexity of the conversation, an experienced agent should be able to handle between 3-5 consecutive conversations.

Average Handling Time

Live chat should be a quick and easy way for consumers to get help. If the conversation takes too long, the customer will find the chat more difficult than it's worth. Instead of trying to find a quick way to get help, they will walk away. Average Handling Time measures the time a chat takes from start to finish.

How to reduce average handling time:

• Follow up the case. Instead of making the customer wait while you investigate something, consider following up later. If a decision won't happen within the scope of a regular chat, the best thing you can do is let them know you'll follow up with them via email or phone.
• Define outliers. If some conversations are taking longer than others, dig in to find out why. Is he one of those agents who could use some extra training? Is this a specific topic that requires further investigation? End those long conversations first for maximum impact.

Also read: Optimizing Your Business With WhatsApp Business Singapore

Service Quality

While a quick response can have a huge impact on the happiness of your customers, the quality of service is also important. Speed ​​plays a big role, but so do accurate answers, friendly tone, and authorized agents to help customers get what they need. There are two main ways to measure service quality: externally through customer satisfaction surveys and internally through quality assurance.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)

After each chat conversation, ask the customer simple questions to get feedback on their chat experience. This question is often expressed as, "Are you satisfied with the help you received today?" The customer can pick between 2 options “Yes, I am satisfied” or “No, I am not satisfied.” 

How to increase customer satisfaction:

• Show CSAT score. Customer service agents are often motivated to provide better customer service when a company's CSAT score comes out. By tracking your CSAT on a company-wide dashboard, you will reinforce how important customer satisfaction is to your company goals.
• Respond to any feedback. First, respond immediately to customers who have had bad experiences and see if you can improve the situation. Second, check if you can address the root of the problem so that other customers don't have the same experience.

Internal Quality Score

While customer opinions are important, they are not always the most qualified person to measure the quality of support you provide. Your standards are the most important - you may want to get your agents to live up to what your customers do. Internal Quality Score is a metric based on conversation reviews.

How to increase internal quality score:

• Determine what quality means to you. It's important to know where you want to see yourself so you understand what to look for in conversation reviews. Once you've decided to position your call center, you'll be able to create specific, actionable goals that create a vision of support.
• Consider using peer reviews. While it may be tempting for managers to simply complete their review, peer review has many benefits. Inexperienced agents can learn a lot from differentiating conversations from more experienced agents. Also, because they understand it from a new perspective, they may discover something that the rest of the team doesn't have.

Also read: Verification WhatsApp for Business to Build Trust with Customer

Sales

For some teams, their primary goal of offering live chat is to convert visitors to sales. If this is the case, it's really important to be measuring how effective your chat sales funnel is.

Engagement rates

If you're offering a proactive chat (a pop-up invitation for customers to talk with your team), it's important to know how many visitors take you up on that invitation. You want customers to engage with your proactive chat windows because it offers them a place to have their questions resolved. In fact, 44% of consumers say having live chat available to have questions answered during a purchase is one of the most important features a business can offer.

How to increase engagement rates:

• Consider where you're popping up chat. Make sure you're targeting the places along your customer journey where customers are most likely to have questions.
• If you notice a proactive message is getting a very low engagement rate, it's time to optimize. 

Leads generated

Tracking the number of customers who convert after you talk with them is key to proving the value of live chat internally. The more leads that your live chat agents convert, the better the business case for expanding chat availability across different hours and website pages.

How to increase lead generation:

• Track converting conversations. Make this metric easier to track by labeling conversations that lead to a sale. Then, you can simply report on conversations that are tagged. You can also use integration with your CRM or e-commerce platform to connect chat conversations with purchases.
• Automate FAQ. Identify the common questions customers have just before they purchase - can you answer those questions for prospects on the website before they need to talk to a human?

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