Chapter 8: Leveraging Chat and Email Transcripts to Drive Growth

Having a direct line with your customers means that you have a connection with your audience that few brands have been able to have before. 

You have data. Use it to grow! 

In this chapter, we’ll talk about how to draw insights from your chats, and which chat metrics really matter.

First off, here’s how to pull insights from your live chat transcripts:

1. Download transcripts.
   
   
2. Comb through data and trends. Look for a few key things:
   
   » Recurring questions
   » Customer language
   » Customer requests
   » Customer pain points
   
   It may take a little while, but it’s worth it!
   
   
3. Create a list of 5-10 observations. The shorter, the better.
   
   
4. List out all potential cost-effective solutions and find the best ones. Look at the bigger picture and weigh the cost-benefit...then choose what will bring you the most value.
   
   
5. Take action. Chunk the solution into realistic pieces over time—This is much better than being struck by analysis paralysis.
   
   
6. Keep on analyzing by rinsing and repeating step one and two every month. 
   

Now, let’s look at chat KPI metrics that matter (and what you can learn from them). 

Customer Satisfaction Rate (CSAT Scores) — It’s important to be aware that 100% customer satisfaction is an unrealistic goal, because you’ll always have a handful of interactions that don’t go as planned.

This doesn’t mean that the interaction was necessarily bad. Sometimes, a great interaction accidentally gets a bad review, or someone is in an unfortunately cranky mood that day. It’s life. We strive for a 90%+ satisfaction rate at Ravience (and our agents continuously hit the mark).  

Watch your CSAT Scores and pull out trends to see if there’s a certain point of conversation that continuously hits a snag, or a certain product that continues to break.

How can you fix these issues so that customers no longer see them as a roadblock to excellent CX?

Initial and Average Response Times — Quick response times are key to keeping a conversation going. Think about how annoying it is when someone doesn’t text back, you start doing something, and then (right as you’re starting to get in the zone)....bing!

As I’ve mentioned before, most customers expect a message back quickly. 

RESPONSE TIMES
Live Chat — a few seconds (Ravience’s live chat time guarantee is 40 seconds)
SMS Messaging — one to two minutes
Email — within 24 hours

Someone needs to be ready to respond to messages during business hours, especially during the hours when your website has a spike in traffic.

Chat Duration — If a conversation is quick, it means that the agent has time to move on to the next chat; however, you always want to make sure that the customer is taken care of and walks away from the situation generally pleased.

Determine how long you want your chats to last in order to be effective and time efficient, then set that as your standard.

Total # of Chats — If you have a high number of chats, you’re doing a great job of engaging your website visitors. Measuring your total number of chats can help you determine where you might need another proactive chat, or if you need to rephrase your messaging to inspire more conversations.

You can also use this metric to determine how many live chat agents you need at any given time. If you have a small chat volume and five agents, you probably want to figure out how to increase your chat volume (or cut back on agents until you do).

Conversion Rates — This is one of the most important metrics to keep an eye on: seeing if a customer converted into a sale. It usually increases when companies have live chat on their website!

Raviences agents have demonstrated a 52% average increase in qualified leads with our client’s customized live chat conversation flows.

Sales Tracker — Implement a method that allows you to track the sales that are directly coming from conversation with your agents. You could do this with a code, or a question during checkout.

You could also include a feedback question if you want even more insightful data that can help drive business growth. 

Of course, this is just one piece of data you can use to improve customer experience. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss how you can apply other metrics to improve your CX as you grow.