5 Tips on How to Get Your Chatbot Live Chat Experience to the Next Level

Live agents support is one of the most common use cases for the chatbots implemented by businesses who would like to give their customers a possibility to get in touch with the support agents in case the chatbot functionality doesn’t satisfy their current needs. Based on my professional experience, I would like to share several tips that might help you save your time and money when you decide to integrate the live agent support into your chatbot.

Tip 1

Integrate with the live agent support service that lets you scale easily and doesn’t affect the budget drastically.

The number of chatbot users will be constantly growing both organically and via paid channels if you keep investing properly. The number of chat requests will grow correspondingly which may cause an issue with the number of chat requests the agents can support. If you have the live agents support available in the chatbot make sure that the number of agents assigned to this channel will be able to process the number of chat requests from users. Neglecting this at early stages will make users feel frustrated and unwanted by the business.

Scaling can become one of the greatest challenges unless taken care of beforehand. Be wise ;) The market currently offers lots of options starting from leaders, like LivePerson and SalesForce, up to smaller start-up companies in the field.

Tip 2

Authenticate users to log them into their personal accounts before escalating to an agent.

Users authentication can become handy when a user already has his personal account with your company, business or service and wants to speak to an agent from the chatbot channel. This option should be provided as soon as a user requests a chat with an agent to make sure that a user can authenticate and when connected to an agent, the support agent can easily see his personal information, history or any other relevant and required data to be able to help resolve any issues more efficiently.

Tip 3

Implement follow-up logic when the support agents are busy talking to other customers.

Basically, the user needs to feel he hasn’t been left off without an answer and the bot does its best to connect him to an agent as soon as possible. Custom backend logic needs to be implemented in this case. Spend some time to develop a simple follow-up cycle when a user in the queue is followed-up with the message every 2–5 minutes to make sure he doesn’t drop off. The message may say that he is still in the queue and an agent will be assigned asap.

Tip 4

Provide clear instructions on how to start and stop the chat.

If users do not know how to start or stop the chat with an agent it will lead to frustration and drop off. And we do not want that to happen. Ensure that the bot has options to trigger the chat throughout the flow or in the main menu, etc. When the chat is started to give an option to end it at that very moment by clicking a button or a quick reply. Sometimes, users just explore the bot flow and click on different flow elements to check them out, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they want to chat with a support agent. By giving them an ability to stop the chat, you will minimize the number of unwanted requests and will save your support agents’ time and energy to assist those customers who do need it.

Tip 5

Make sure the ‘chat with agent’ buttons are UNavailable during non-working hours.

It makes no sense to offer users options that do not work and expect them to be happy with that. If the agents are not available due to non-working hours make sure you explicitly present that to chatbot users either by setting up a proper copy or by automatically removing this option from the chatbot flow.

Hopefully, these pieces of advice will save your time and financial expenses when implementing integration with one of the multiple live chat services available on the market in your chatbots. Cheers!