How to make managing live chat easy for your team

Our workdays have distractions left and right. With incoming emails, meetings, chats from our teammates, and competing priorities, the battle for our attention is fierce.

That’s what makes live website chat tricky for teams to manage. Customers love — and even prefer — getting help in real time, but answering chat messages can be a challenge for even the most productive sales or support team.

How can your team respond to constant pings throughout the day — while juggling other communication channels like email, phone, social media, and SMS text messages, and getting day-to-day work done?

Here’s how you can help your team easily manage live chats, without switching tools and feeling distracted.

1. Keep all your communication tools together

First things first: Switching back and forth from email, chat, SMS, and social to communicate with customers all day is a pain. The easy solution? Bring all those messages into one platform, and pair it with Front Chat, our live website chat solution.

With Front Chat, you can manage live website chat directly in Front, alongside your other messages, like email, social messages, or SMS. That way, you can draft and send answers for every channel from the same app.

Since you can access every conversation you’ve had with customers all at once, your team can give better replies. Plus, since it’s all in one app, you can easily move a conversation from chat to email to give a more thorough response. All you need to do is ask for their email. No switching tools, no nonsense.

2. Arm your team to answer with confidence

Finding answers to endless questions is one of the hardest parts of managing live chat. Fix that by allowing your team to collaborate on chat and find answers together.

With Front Chat, you can chat internally with the team and externally with the customer or prospect. Ask for help or pass questions to other teammates by using @mentions and assignments. Here are a few examples:

• Ask for approval from your boss: “Here’s our conversation…Is it okay to extend this user’s free trial?”

• Verify information from your teammate: “@Tim I think you know this answer, so I’m assigning this to you. Can you follow up?”

• Pass a technical question over to an engineer:“@Sarah Can you handle this question about our API?”

3. Balance the workload for your team

No one likes getting bombarded with messages. To prevent that, dish out messages evenly to keep the chat workload manageable for everyone.

Use Front Chat to automate the distribution of messages the way you want. Customizable rules let you organize incoming chats, or route them to the right team member automatically. Here are a few examples:

• Round robin: Distribute chats to all teammates evenly to assign new leads or support tickets fairly.

• Keyword message: Send chats that contain a keyword or phrase, like “free trial” or “refund”, to a specific teammate.

• Time of day: Route chats received during certain time periods to teammates who will be awake, or who will have time to answer.

4. Set it up one time, not many

Make it easy to set up chat — and change it as time goes on — with only one group of settings for all your communication channels.

Say Roger handles all your team’s support questions dealing with refunds. Normally you’d have to route messages from chat, email, and SMS platforms individually to Roger, and have him log in separately to all three. In Front Chat, you can set a rule for the keyword “refund” one time, and it will apply across every channel.

Then if you wanted to give refunds to another teammate instead, you can change the settings once, not in every channel separately.

5. Track chats to meet your goals

At the end of the day, live chat is only useful if it’s making a positive impact on your business, your customers, and your team.

Measure your chatting habits against your company’s goals with Front Chat analytics. Here are a few examples of goals you can measure for live chat:

• Increase customer satisfaction: Track response times and performance of individual team members.

• Decrease customer support costs: Measure ticket volume across all platforms to see how chat cuts down on more expensive or time-consuming platforms, like phone calls.

• Increase sales and revenue: Gauge how keeping closer contact with customers (and keeping all your conversations in once place) helps move leads through the funnel faster.

Live chat is super convenient for customers and prospects, and it’s the fastest way for your team to give personal, thorough responses.

Instead of dealing with the hassle of managing chat, email, SMS, and social separately, make it seamless for your team. Pull all your communication channels together in Front, and use Front Chat to manage your live website chat.