Time for a chat?

It's all about knowing when to reach out, he says. For example, he says, a bank may know that if someone spends more than two minutes on a certain step in an application, they're highly likely to abandon the process altogether.

“Sometimes it may be due to a legitimate interruption, like the phone rang or the baby's crying,” he says. But in a lot of cases these customers are at risk because they're confused, they're having second thoughts, they're not sure what information they need or they don't understand the question.

“If I can put an agent in front of that person in one minute and 50 seconds or one minute and 45 seconds, an agent who understands where that person is in the process and can help them get over that hump, then it's a win-win for everybody involved.”

That said, Kohn adds that one of the biggest mistakes companies make with proactive chat is being too aggressive with it.

“It's like if you walk into a store and a sales clerk immediately comes running up to you,” he says.

The agent issue

Another important consideration for merchants employing online chat is making sure the contact-center agents have the unique qualifications the channel demands. Obviously, chat customer-service agents should be literate and have typing skills.

Foremost among those qualifications for merchants selling noncomplex products and services, according to Kohn, is that chat agents be able to multitask.

“One of the benefits of chat is you can handle multiple inquiries at the same time,” he says. “We call it concurrency.”

Concurrency is usually directly proportionate to the complexity of the product, Kohn says. “If it's a sophisticated product like financial services or brokerage, you'll want to make it one-to-one. If it's a retail product, you can probably do three to four concurrent chats, especially if it's a trained agent.”

But it's important not to force chat representatives to attempt to handle too many queries at once, says COPC's Martin.

“I've sat down with chat agents trying to run eight different chats at once and they get overwhelmed,” he says. And the time between responses is too long, which is frustrating for customers.

“I've seen companies make planning assumptions about the number of concurrent chat sessions an agent can handle that are way off the mark,” Martin says. “The expected cost saves aren't there, customer frustration is much higher than they thought it was going to be, so what looked like a promising technology to take care of more people can backfire pretty fast.”

Alton adds that with contact-center agents being increasingly required to interact with customers through multiple channels, the job is getting more complex.

“You need an individual in that position with more training, more education and more smarts,” he says.