- Introduction
- Step 1: Align chat goals with business objectives
- Step 2: Manage customer experience and chat volume
- Step 3: Determine your staffing requirements
- Step 4: Train your agents
- Step 5: Build a chat workflow
- Step 6: Monitor success metrics and improve chat deployment
There are three aspects of training chat agents:
- Ensure agents have a solid understanding of your product or service
- Provide guidance on the proper etiquette for chatting with customers
- Familiarize agents with Zendesk Chat
Give agents the relevant knowledge
To get new agents onboarded, make sure you have a well-organized internal knowledge base they can use to learn about your product or service. Once they have read through the KB, test them on the material. If they can't answer basic questions about your product or service, they won’t be able to help customers.
To make complex answers easier to deliver, consider creating shortcuts with product-specific information. These will allow agents to quickly answer challenging questions.
Having an internal shared knowledge base is also useful for agents to keep themselves apprised of the latest product updates.
In general, the agent knowledge base, standard text, canned messages, snippets, and URLs should be shared and integrated. Creating and maintaining individual information repositories is expensive and difficult to maintain. It also increases the risk of creating and using contradictory information which will erode the customer’s level of trust.
Teach chat etiquette
Having the relevant product knowledge is important, but chat is quite different from email or even social support. Customers won’t wait minutes, let alone hours for a response and the onus will be on the chat agent to ensure they are able to serve customers in real-time.
In general, customers perceive chat as a more personal interaction channel than say email. Customers are used to “chatting” with their friends and family over SMS – a platform where emojis and LOLs rule – so they might expect a similar tone when talking to the chat agent of a business. However, it’s never a good idea for your agents to assume this. It’s best for agents to assess each situation individually and, when in doubt, err on the side of formality.
To ensure agents are providing customers with the best possible responses, create a few generic shortcuts. For example, you can create a simple greeting shortcut that agents can use for all customers (“Hi! Welcome to Omni Wear. Is there anything I can help you with?”). Not only does this ensure that your brand voice stays consistent, less confident agents can use it to get their feet wet.
Finally, always review chat transcripts and CSAT scores. These will show if customers are happy with their experience and if your agents are able to maintain your brand voice.
Additional considerations
Before creating a training plan for your agents, here are some questions to consider:
- How complicated are your products?
- What is the experience level of your agents?
- What kind of resources do agents have access to? What can they share with customers?
- Do you normally see customers asking the same kinds of questions?
- What is the native language of your agents? Is it the same as the majority of your customers?
- Do you have very strict brand or similar guidelines?
- Do your agents have experience with other chat or live support products?
6 Comments
Just some feedback here. Is there any way for the links in this article to go directly to the needed information rather than bringing up the Chat | Zendesk Blog general page? It's a bit hard to navigate that page to find what I need. Plus is seems sales driven.
I've signed in to see if I would get different information sent, but the same thing happens.
For example, on this page, proper etiquette goes to https://www.zendesk.com/blog/tags/zendesk-chat/. I would love if it actually went directly to the article on proper etiquette.
Hello Lateesha Clark,
I appreciate the feedback on this article and its navigation structure. Our blogs serve as another valuable route for others to learn more about the many offerings from Zendesk. While they are not going to solve all of our customer's needs, they do hold very informative and useful information. Please don't hesitate to let us know how we can keep improving, and again, we do appreciate the feedback.
Best regards.
Hi Lateesha Clark,
Thanks for the feedback. I think you're asking for the links to go to specific articles or blog posts instead of just linking to the blog in general. I agree, the links should go to specific articles/posts or be removed if there's nothing specific to link to. We'll clean that up. Thanks for letting us know!
Hi Jennifer & Devan,
Thank you for the quick response to my feedback! Yes, Jennifer, that's is right in line with my thinking. It would be great to still see the blog for further reference.
Hi, Lateesha!
I've updated the links in this step of the article, to blog posts where they're available, otherwise to relevant Help Center articles (or deleting them if there isn't a useful link).
I'm working on updating links in the other 5 steps now. Thanks so much for catching this!
Hi Amy,
Yay! This is exactly what I was hoping for. I'm deploying Zendesk Chat for the first time for our business. This will be very helpful for us. Thank you so much for the quick fix :)
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