Keeping up with online customer queries challenges even the most adroit rep
Though live text chat has only been offered on e-commerce sites for about five years, that’s long enough for best practices to emerge suggesting that the skills that make good phone agents don’t necessarily make good chat agents, and vice-versa.
“Initially, a lot of the phone switching companies said you could have the skills blended in one agent who could handle phone, e-mail and chat,” says Daniel Sears, director of product management and strategic alliances at CRM technology and services provider Talisma Inc. “There’s nothing preventing it from a technical perspective, but from a skill set perspective it doesn’t make sense. Chat and e-mail are more closely aligned because they are text-based. Typically we find most businesses separate phone reps from chat and e-mail reps.”
However, agents who are good speakers and also happen to be good typists can do well with chat. “Chat is rapid, back and forth, and tends to be in short snippets vs. e-mail, where you are writing paragraphs,” he adds.
At CRM technology and services provider LivePerson Inc., Tony Pante, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy, believes agents do best when dedicated to one customer channel at a time. “Handling chat, phone and e-mail at the same time is very hard to do. You don’t want a long delay in response if you’ve got chat, because the expectation is response will be quick. If I’m waiting a minute or two for the response, I’m going to abandon,” he says. Pante adds that while he’s seen clients with low chat volume deploy agents to handle both e-mail and chat, clients with higher chat volume often divide that responsibility by schedule, with agents spending one part of their shift on chat and balance on responding to e-mail.
One of the first users of online chat among major e-retail sites, LandsEnd.com, No. 17 in the Internet Retailer Top 300 Guide to online retailers, takes a different approach. It’s one of very few call centers where Internet agents are responsible for handling customer queries via phone, e-mail and chat. But not every call center agent becomes an Internet agent. Manager of customer services Angie Bellinder says that while dedicated phone agents at Lands’ End’s four call centers number in the thousands, those at the company’s two web-enabled call centers who are trained to also handle e-mail, chat and co-browsing number in the hundreds.
Hired internally from the ranks of phone agents, web agents must pass rigorous written and technical testing to prove they can multitask and adapt quickly to ongoing changes on the site. Once they make it into the Internet group, which has a higher compensation rate, few agents leave, says Bellinder. “The Internet agents with us now have an average nine years of experience,” she says. “There is very little turnover.”
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