Are you wondering what live chat metrics and KPIs to use to establish your chat performance? Looking for advice on what data to look at to know how well you’re doing?
FACT: Few other channels have as enormous an effect on a business as live chat. Live chat increases customer satisfaction, boosts loyalty, increases conversion rates, drives sales and revenue, and more.
But…does it apply in your case? How do know whether your live chat efforts bring similar success?
Quick answer: By regularly monitoring live chat metrics and KPIs.
In this article, you’ll discover the most important live chat metrics to determine live chat success. This advice will help you understand live chat effectiveness and learn more about your agent’s performance.
Let’s begin!
Top Live Chat Metrics & KPIs to Measure Chat Performance
1. Number of chats
Knowing how many chat sessions happen daily, weekly, or monthly can help you discover various aspects of your business operations. For example:
- The number of confused visitors that used to leave your website (prior to implementing live chat) because they didn’t have any convenient communication option to ask queries. In other words, the metric will reveal the number of potential customers you gained just because of live chat.
- The percentage of the current customers that prefer live chat support over whatever other support options you offer. If the majority does, it means you have improved customer experience.
- The common questions and issues potential users have.
- The number of live chat agents you need to answer all the chat requests efficiently.
- Compared with sales data, the metric can also help establish your average conversion rate from live chat by establishing how many chatting customers converted into sales and customers.
2. Average First Response Time (FRT) and Chat Response Time
One of the primary reasons why people prefer live chat communication is the speed of response. And needless to say, the faster you answer, the more satisfied your customers are and the more memorable the customer service becomes.
Measuring the average resolution time will help you see how quickly your agents respond to chat requests. You’ll also find out the average wait time missed chat rate (i.e., the number of chats missed in comparison to the total number of chats requested) in doing so.
If the numbers are low, you can do the following things:
- Integrate dedicated live chat software like Social Intents to converse with website visitors in real-time from Slack or Microsoft Teams – two of the most widely used business communications platforms. Doing so will bring both internal and external communication in one place, making all communications more efficient.
Your agents will see chat requests in the (dedicated) group or channel once set up. The available agent can join the chat and start assisting right away.
- Implement a chatbot to engage the visitor or customer and answer FAQs.
- Add sales or support team to live chat.
3. Chat to conversion rate
Live chat support improves customer experience, leading to customer loyalty and retention. Measuring that conversion rate is very difficult. So I won’t talk about that.
However, you can easily measure the conversion rate of new visitors (who start a live chat with the sales team, especially). You can find:
- The number and info of people who signed up for the free trial after chatting with your sales agent.
- The % of people who gave their contact information (email, phone, name, etc.) or signed up for the newsletter. According to a survey, 42% of people prefer giving contact information through live chat.
- The number of people who signed up for your product or service after giving their info and receiving an email sequence or calls.
- The number of people who got more aware of your product or service after a live chat. These people are likely to buy from you in the future.
TIP – Start proactive chatting to increase the number of chats. By proactively reaching out to customers, you can initiate more conversations and boost the conversion rate.
4. Customer Satisfaction Rating (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction rating (or CSAT) is perhaps the most common metric across all support channels. The metric reveals how satisfied the customers are from the live chat session they just had.
Typically, customers give a star rating from 5 after the chat ends — where 1 is a horrible experience, and 5 is an excellent experience. [Of course, you can use your own style (like ‘😔’, ‘😐’, and ‘😀’).]
Ideally, you want the average score to be 5-stars, which will require a quick response to customer queries and a quick solution to those queries.
If you filter CSAT per live chat agent, you’ll be able to objectively determine who is your ace agent and who needs training.
5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
CSAT shows how happy the customers are with their just-had live chat experience. Net Promoter Score (or NPS) shows how happy the customers are from their overall experience. This includes not only their live chat experience(s) but also their liking of the product or service, your business’s values, and more.
NPS helps determine how loyal the customer is to the brand and how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others.
You can send a dedicated survey to find NPS immediately after a live chat session. It’s likely you’ll get better quality and quantity of the responses just after a support request or query is resolved.
TIP: You can use the NPS survey to ask about the live chat support interaction, specifically.
Typically, customers give a score between 0 and 10, with an option to add feedback/reasoning. The ones giving 9 or 10 are “Promoters,” and those giving between 0 and 6 are “Detractors.”
NPS = % of Promoters – % of Detractors
6. Agent utilization rate
Agent utilization rate shows how productive your live chat agents are. You can calculate it by using this formula:
Agent utilization rate = [(Average chats handled per agent in a single month x Average time spent per chat session)/(Average chats handled simultaneously x Workdays in a month x Total work hours in a day x 60 minutes)] x100
Find out the number for all chat agents. If this score turns out below average (or if the CSAT is poor) for an agent, maybe it’s time to train and make them aware of all the live chat best practices.
Conclusion
Offering visitors the option to live chat with your brand can help increase customer satisfaction, boost sales, and increase revenue. But that can only happen if you know whether your live chat performs at the best level possible.
Hence live chat metrics. In this post, I’ve shared the most important KPIs to determine live chat ROI, and evaluate the effectiveness of the channel.
Start implementing and measuring them today, and soon you’ll know exactly what is working and which areas of live chat need improvement.
Good luck!