What Can Group Discussions and Mock Practices Teach Your Live Chat Agents?

The implementation of live chat software is a great step forward towards improving your customer service. However, the initial training that customer support agents receive is not enough for reaching the best performance. Over time, organizing monthly group discussions and mock practices is necessary to enable your customer support team to move forward and achieve better results.

If you are thinking of improving your live chat customer support through group discussions, these are the things that your customer support agents will become better at.

How to communicate properly?

Yes, the initial training includes all the guides on how to communicate with your customers, however, there is no magic formula that always gets the job done in the best way. With time and practice, all of the agents will pick a specific approach to communicate with clients. Some approaches are for the better, whereas others are for the worse. The group discussion will allow those who excel in the field of customer communication to share their best practices.

Through improved communication practices, your customer support team will be able to increase customer satisfaction, which is necessary for the long-term well-being of your company.

How to handle multiple chats simultaneously?

This is an issue that many live chat agents struggle with in the beginning. However, group sessions can include practicing as well, where agents can simulate circumstances when someone is contacted by several customers at once.

Through mock practices, all of the live chat customer support agents can become significantly better. Practice is important for a variety of business processes, and customer support is no different. With mock practices, you can expect your customer support team to become much more effective, as they are going to become better at communicating with several customers simultaneously, getting more work done for the same period of time.

What is the best approach of probing customers?

Communicating with people is a challenging task, as every single person that shows up in the live chat software is going to be different. However, with a thorough investigation, all of them can be separated in several groups. The result is going to be a specific approach to every single group of customers.

One of the problems that many live chat agents face is creating a natural conversation that will allow them to acquire crucial information for resolving the issue. However, by sharing their experiences, the team can show examples of the probing techniques they are using. Over time, this will enable every customer support agent to become much better at probing users, allowing them to resolve issues much faster.

How to apply the methods of the best live chat agents?

No matter how great your team functions as a whole, there are always going to be agents who simply perform much better than others. The simple reason for this lies in the fact that some people are passionate about customer support and have great communication skills they actively worked on, which helps them perform better than the other team members.

Organizing group discussions is a perfect setting for the best performing agent to share his best practices. This will allow the whole group to move forward, owing to the fact that the rest of the team will adopt some of the practices that the best live chat agent uses.

To give more incentive, find a way to reward those who are the best. It will make it easier for them to share their knowledge with the rest of the team.

How to handle online “trolls”?

This is an issue that is present in all types of industries, and it appeared with the immense popularity of the internet. No matter what business you are in, your live chat customer support agents will face problems with these people sooner or later. This is usually performed by the teenage population, but also by those who are bored and want to have fun.

However, people who do this do not realize that they are speaking with an actual person, and in some cases, the live chat agent can become quite distracted due to the emotions he or she is feeling.

Luckily, organising group discussions will allow the customer support team to devise techniques for dealing with these types of situations. With an appropriate approach, the customer team will become skilled with better ignoring these types of situations, thus helping them stay focused on helping the actual customers who need assistance.

How to be a true team player

Regularly organizing group activities is a perfect way to bring people closer. You can expect your customer team to understand how important knowledge sharing actually is and how it can help them become better agents in the future. Furthermore, sharing ideas, examples and solutions is the perfect way of making the team members feel like they belong to a group working towards the same cause, making them invest themselves more every single time a group meeting is organised.

Becoming a team player is not natural for many people, but with organizing mock practices and group discussions, your whole customer support team will learn how to share and work together on improving their efficiency.

All these things show that organising group discussions and mock practices are a great approach that will make your team become much versatile and ready to quickly solve many customer support requests at once.

Conclusion

Having live support software is not enough without a team of people who do not how to take the most advantage of it. Through group work, your team will continuously become better. If you haven’t yet started organizng mock practices, it’s time to start doing so. I guarantee that you will love the result.

We wish to thank Robin is a Technical Support Executive at ProProfs for his contribution.