Support Driven Highlights: Rolling out chat for a team that comes from a 100% email background

Hey, Support Driven Community. 👋🏻

We’re starting to highlight some questions and answers you’ve all shared via Slack on our blog. We want to showcase your unique perspectives beyond just Slack.

If you’re not familiar with our Slack community, it’s full of 8,000+ members who care about customer support. We ask for advice, share our expertise, and have fun virtually connecting.

Let's get into this week's highlights.

We're hoping to pilot live chat in the near future, but I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around how to think about staffing for it. We're a semi small team with reach into several regions and customers that have been asking for some sort of chat well before I joined. In a perfect world we'd jump in with both feet and turn it on but that would probably require us to double our headcount. Has anyone rolled out chat for an existing team that's comes from a 100% email background, and had success without exponentially growing their teams?

"We've been ramping up chat for the past couple of years with our team. The only way it's possible is because we use Help Scout, where the chat feature turns off when our available team members have their maximum number of chats. That feature is amazing!"

- Angela Marshall, Senior Support Manager at YNAB

"@Angela That's smart, and I know you can do something similar in Zendesk (we did that at my old company, who was chat focused).
I am leaning toward rolling out slowly to some selected customers, yes. The highest tier customers are some of the most vocal on this front, so I don't think we'd be worried about too few customers in the pilot."

- Kevan Gammage, Global Director of Customer Support at Brandwatch

"I'd start with limited hours for chat when you have the most staff on - it won't be great, but it will prevent it from feeling overwhelming or from the team feeling like their whole day is spent doing real time support (can help with the transition). also ideal if at first you can limit where the chat button is displayed!"

- Alana, Program Manager at PartnerHero

"@sarahleeyoga wrote about this: https://www.helpscout.com/blog/implementing-live-chat/"

- Mathew Patterson, Help Scout

"I've been involved in implementing chat at a couple of different places and the short version is that no matter how many people you think you need, it's not enough.People can and will see that chat icon and use it to ask questions that they previously found for themselves. They also begin to have an implicit expectation of more immediate responses.In short, it becomes a hole into which you throw labor hours. I'm not saying don't ever do it, but it's EXPENSIVE in every sense of the word."

- Ash Rhodes, Leadership and Remote Work Coach

"I think that there is also an aspect of what type of work your company does. If there is a sales aspect to it, the chat can allow you to recoup some expense by helping increase conversions (e.g. reduce cart abandonment). If it’s a solely to answer questions then it can definitely become a time sink. Particularly moving from email to chat. Moving from Phone to chat can save some time because of the ability to handle simultaneous interactions.One other thing that can be done to mitigate some of the load from chat is to incorporate a chatbot, but (and this is a big but) it takes a lot of work to make a chatbot useful enough to deflect questions and not frustrate users."

- Tamir Goldberg, Support Manager at InVision

We are a B2B SaaS company and our support is a 50 member product specialist support team. We are on Freshdesk since 3 years now. They have a Customer Satisfaction feature that goes out with every ticket we close but the % of tickets we get a response on is just about 11%.  I need ideas on how can we increase this to 20% and then what more can i do to increase to 35% and go above 50%(final goal).

"50% is a pretty lofty goal. I'm in the gaming industry and we hovered around 8% before we implemented Stella Connect. We were able to bump it up to 20% after implementing Stella but at least for us we are not pushing to increase the response rate."

- Justin Davis, Operations Lead at Riot Games

"Everything up to 10% is considering good. We have a few clients who were working on improving their KPI. Let me ask them if they implemented anything special. The rating experience need to be smooth (ideally, just after the support xp , in the same flow)."

- Maxime Manseau, Support and growth at Hellozest.io

Any advice for responding to fraud chargebacks? My impression is that they're automatic losses for the company, but wondering if there's any amount of due diligence that has worked for others.

"If you have record of convo w/ purchaser, we usually provide that. If they claim something wasn’t delivered, we include tracking information. We have been able to win disputes this way.

Another thing that helped us was setting up payment capture holds on high risk purchases. This allows us to make a judgement call before capturing / reduce amount of high risk orders that are automatically flowing through."

- Krista Atwell, Customer Service & Digi Production

"We would send in everything from order confirmations and receipts to any communication we had with the customer regarding the order. We would win them sometimes."

- Community member

Is there anyone who has a KCS-inspired agent workflow/ experience built into their support tools and who would be willing to show it off confidentially?  I'm curious to see how in the real world people have actually implemented things like that.

"We're on zendesk and leverage their knoweldge capture app to enable agents to follow the KCS workflow.  Basically just a tool that sits on the right-side of their ticketview that has a search function to surface articles from the KB.  When they click on an article, it opens in a popup over the ticket (rather than navigating away from the ticket, or opening a new tab).  From there they can read, flag, or click a button to drop a link to the article into their ticket comment.   The app also has a "create" button to allow them to launch into creating a new article .  Here you can provide some templates to choose from, but it does open a new tab for the actual article creation.

We have added a customization that shows on the ticket any KCS articles that have been create from it.

Not sure if this is the kind of info you were looking for, but feel free to shoot any questions."

- Jay Lee, Project Manager

"We (Coveo) have integration into salesforce and provide more relevant context into such an insight panel. When an agent opens the case, the panel loads and returns results taking into account ANY of the metadata fields you decide to send. We call it adding context. By default the Subject and Description are sent. But if there is a product category, user profile, product version # for example, that can also be sent.

We also have a component to add that displays the last 2000 actions of the customer. What they searched, what they clicked etc. And we do this across session and device.
The agent can quickly see with badges if a user has viewed and article.All of this also come with the analytics of content gaps, poor performing queries.

We also have the extra buttons, like send as email, attach article etc that can also be recorded in our analytics."

- Alistair Field, Customer Success Architect at Coveo

"Our workflow is slightly different as we’re pretty small so don’t know how it would scale.  We use Zendesk/Jira.

Support Engineer flags a ticket or subject suitable for knowledge content or an update to an existing article, They create a “Knowledge Base Article” ticket, where they add the relevant information or write the article themselves. This ticket is reviewed by our digital support lead, who edits and verifies the content. The lead then creates the content in our knowledge base. The lead creates a Jira ticket for our product communications team to review and edit if needed. Article is published. For any critical update we publish right away and prodcomms reviews after the fact. Step 4 extends KCS into the documentation workflow as they can look for any changes that may be required to existing documentation."

- Mario Guisado, Director of Customer Support at xMatters

See you next week with another roundup of Q&A highlights! If you’re not already part of the Support Driven Slack community, join here.

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