Ensuring Your Live Chat KPIs Are Accurate
A live chat KPI, or key performance indicator, is an indication of the health of your live chat system’s performance. If you have no idea what that means, don’t worry! This article will break down what it means to have good KPIs and why it’s important to understand your metrics to make your system better and more valuable to the business.
Why Live Chat KPIs Matter
Live chat is a dynamic component of any business, and it’s important to know how your live chat efforts are performing. As we talked about in our post on live chat software, setting realistic and achievable live chat KPIs is crucial in achieving success with live chat support.
Understanding live chat KPIs is crucial to having an effective live chat support strategy, and there are four main things you need to know about your current live chat KPI. The first thing is that live chat goals vary widely based on several factors, such as industry or client type. For example, in eCommerce, it’s common for companies to use live chat primarily as a means of upselling customers during online transactions. Live chat goals can also vary based on how employees handle each situation that arises—for example, it’s possible to have low abandonment rates but still have terrible retention rates if employees keep leaving customers without resolving their issues.
Live chat metrics are similar to other metrics in that they can be highly effective if you’re using them properly, but they can also be detrimental if they’re used improperly. For example, one common pitfall that many companies make is creating an overwhelming number of live chat KPI goals. Setting too many live chat goals will prevent employees from being able to adequately keep track of their progress and is more likely to confuse customers than help them. If a customer gets a different answer every time they try to get help with an issue, it can cause further frustration and lead to negative reviews or lost business for your company.
Setting KPIs for Live Chat Teams
One of the best ways to ensure your Live Chat KPIs are accurate is to make sure that you’re collecting enough data. If you don’t have a reliable sample size, it can be difficult to determine which Live Chat KPIs truly matter for your team. A good rule of thumb for live chat teams is to aim for a minimum of 20 interactions per hour, but for more complex cases, experts recommend targeting anywhere between 25 and 100 interactions per hour.
Beyond targeting a sufficient number of interactions per hour, you’ll also want to set specific goals for each member of your team. Ideally, they should be based on qualitative and quantitative metrics so you can measure not only how many questions or complaints are being handled, but also how well customer service representatives are doing at responding quickly and resolving issues. For example, if a customer has a question about their order, it shouldn’t take too long for them to get an answer, especially if live chat is advertised as your customer service channel. Some of your team members may require additional guidance as they improve their performance.
All in all, you’ll want to set specific goals for your team based on what they should do as a whole. This will allow you to easily measure performance and identify areas that need additional training. Over time, your team will improve as a whole – but it can take some time before you see significant results. Don’t be discouraged if the performance takes a while to normalize, and remember that data-driven improvements are important to not only saving money but also increasing customer satisfaction with your brand.
Steps to Set Up Live Chat Metrics
The first step to setting up live chat metrics is to select an analytics tool that tracks them by default. Most importantly, they should measure live chat usage, in addition to other metrics such as customer satisfaction and conversion rates. For example, you’ll want a metric like # of live chats x 5 minutes to get a quick snapshot of how many customers were helped in 5 minutes. And remember: If you aren’t tracking live chat usage with your company’s sales CRM, don’t assume it isn’t being used – ask! Chances are people are using it but keeping their work out of Salesforce for privacy reasons or because they’re afraid of being reprimanded for spending too much time on these types of tasks.
So why is live chat usage so important? Just like any other KPI, it’s one indicator of how well your customer service is doing. As most companies don’t have anything in place to measure live chat, it’s also a great metric to use when you begin working on your company’s sales automation plan and want to see if adding live chat can improve sales metrics. Finally, it will be a useful tool for setting performance goals for your agents, who are more likely to exceed their numbers if they know you’re monitoring them.
One of our biggest challenges is communicating how valuable live chat agents are to overall sales, says Stephanie Hiebert, Director of Customer Support at Media Shower. We want to show where live chat fits into a closed-loop process for sales and marketing. We have so many reports we can send managers and executives that tell them how it correlates with leads and revenue, but we haven’t figured out how to make that more obvious in an easy way without just sending another email.
So if you want to set up live chat metrics, ask yourself: What is our conversion goal? If we meet that goal, what will that mean for revenue or overall customer satisfaction? How many chat sessions will we need to achieve our goals?
How Live Chat Can Help in Tracking Key Performance Indicators
Used properly, live chat can help your business in many ways. As far as KPIs go, live chat can be a great tool for tracking customer satisfaction or simply getting an idea of what customers are thinking about at any given time. How does live chat track KPIs? We’ll talk about that in a minute.
By monitoring all kinds of live chats, you’ll be able to see when there are spikes in popularity. If a new product is released or a holiday approaches, you’ll be able to check on sales and orders in your live chat system. If done correctly, live chat can make it much easier for you to track your KPIs simply by monitoring activity in real-time. By making use of tools like custom reporting tools and real-time visitor analytics (such as click tracking), you can gain deep insights into everything from which keywords customers used to reach your site to how many visitors entered with specific social media links. And once that information is in place, you can start making smart business decisions that impact your bottom line!
For example, live chat can help track visitors to your site. What’s great about live chat is that you don’t have to simply rely on a guess when it comes to whether or not people are viewing your content. While some businesses count hits on their website to track traffic, hit counts alone won’t tell you anything about what those visitors do when they land on your page. Click tracking in a live chat system helps solve that problem: it tracks how many clicks any given link receives and breaks them down into visitor information for better insights into how customers respond to specific links. Want to know which headline on your homepage is garnering more attention? Tracking in real-time with live chat will let you find out!
What’s more, live chat can help you generate leads. When someone asks a question that requires some follow-up, use tools like form analytics to track how many leads come from live chat and how many visitors click on your live chat system (we’ll discuss these in detail later). In addition to tracking your KPI metrics in real-time with live chat, you can also use it to make smart business decisions that impact your bottom line. Once you have all of your necessary information in place and understand which customer segments are interacting with live chat, you can start using that data to make smart decisions about marketing campaigns and sales offers. Targeting specific customers is easier than ever with customer information available right at your fingertips!
Conclusion
The ultimate goal of a live chat is to convert visitors into leads. Sometimes your chat might be designed just to answer questions, while other times it might be focused on getting people to sign up for something. Either way, there are certain KPIs you can follow to measure your success, and we’ve put together a quick guide that explains how you can track these key performance indicators (KPIs) accurately. If you use them right, they’ll help you monitor your live chat so that you know if it’s helping with conversions and keeping users coming back time and time again.
As you can see, there are quite a few different metrics you can track to see how your live chat is performing. Most of these metrics should be straightforward, but a few of them might require a bit more clarification. The bounce rate is worth breaking down since it depends on several different factors. A higher bounce rate than usual could indicate something wrong with your site or something about your chat user interface (UI) or service that doesn’t line up with your audience’s needs. If you notice a sudden jump in bounce rate, take some time to identify what caused it and then fix any issues before they get worse.
