Chatting without a ticketing system

Provide website visitors with a quick and clear answer at any time. That’s what chatting is all about. The rule is that visitors should receive a response within 30 seconds. A completely different expectation pattern than with other forms of digital customer contact (e-mail, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp). A response time of 5 minutes for Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp or one day for e-mail is acceptable. It is one of the biggest challenges of chatting to always assist visitors within 30 seconds. Undermanning and peak moments on the chat can cause chat operators to receive too many chats at the same time. Chat software developers have come up with a solution for this.

Tickets: the sub-optimal solution
The solution that has been created for this is to issue a ticket. A ticket is a message that can be left in the chat to which the chat operator later responds. The answer is later sent to the visitor’s e-mail address. In the event that chats cannot be answered immediately, or the answer cannot be found immediately, chat conversations are converted into a ticket. This is of course a great way to help these visitors. However, by issuing tickets, you expose your own weaknesses and do not make optimal use of the qualities of the contact tool. It shows that you don’t have enough manpower to help all chatting website visitors. The result is that visitors don’t get an immediate response, making them less likely to convert.

The solution
We chat for more than 250 customers and have never written a ticket before. As a live chat service provider it is of course essential to have the team in order. But instead of focusing on deploying more chat operators, there are other solutions as well. You can only place the chat on certain pages of the website, such as: the shopping cart page, the page where the subscription can be changed, product pages, etc. Often it is not worthwhile to get in touch with every visitor. Visitors with a concrete interest in your product or service are the ones you want to get in touch with. The same applies for visitors who want to cancel or downgrade a subscription. Those are the visitors you want to convince to keep their subscription.

Behavioral targeting
Next week we will write an article about behavioral targeting. Behavioural targeting can be used to use live chat more efficiently. it is an algorithm that determines which visitors receive a proactive greeting to chat. The algorithm analyses the behaviour of visitors and determines which visitors are valuable to get in touch with, based on the pattern they follow on the website.

Conclusion
By creating tickets you actually remove the strongest quality of chat: direct contact. It is not always important to give every visitor the opportunity to chat. Live chat is the translation of the physical shop assistant to a website. Shop employees also don’t appeal to everyone they see. They use vendor instinct to determine which visitor they are or are not addressing. Using more chat operators is not always possible or necessary. Looking closely at where and who gives you the opportunity to chat is a more efficient solution.