By Kirsten Robinson
Despite the significant technology investments companies make to establish web chat capabilities, staffing it is often an afterthought. Most companies continue to tweak staffing after deploying the channel initially, realizing it demands different skills than phone interactions.
However, for any company implementing web chat, it’s important to determine from the get-go how many chats each rep can handle concurrently in order to maintain operational efficiency yet preserve customer satisfaction. In fact, we get this question all the time from CCC members.
The short answer is that it depends on the complexity of the web chat topics your agents are handling, and/or the tenure of those agents. But we’ve learned that, on average, reps handling more than two chat conversations simultaneously gain efficiency at the expense of customer satisfaction, and most companies limit the number to 2-5.
When companies do allow reps to handle more than one chat at a time, there are smart steps they can take to ensure quality. Earthlink is a great example—learn more about how the company creates guardrails to ensure chat is both cost-effective and the interactions with customers are high quality.
Loading ...
Related posts:
Commenting Guidelines
We hope conversations will be energetic, constructive, and provocative. All posts will be reviewed by our editors and may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance.
We ask that you adhere to the following guidelines.
1. No selling of products or services.
2. No ad hominem attacks. These are conversations in which we debate ideas. Criticize ideas, not the people behind them.