Customer Service 
Live chat is one of the most preferred channels that can provide customers with an easy way to reach out to customer support whenever they get issues. It also gives your customers real-time conversations and higher levels of customer satisfaction. However, if you do not measure live chat performance metrics and have an effective strategy, you will not understand whether it benefits your business growth or not. Thus, live chat metrics are important to measure the effectiveness and know what you need to improve.
In this article, we will indicate the importance of live chat to your business, and also give you 6 key performance metrics that you need to measure. Let’s dive in immediately.
The importance of live chat metrics
Improve support experience
The main reason why customers prefer live chat is that it can quickly or even immediately give them answers.
Live chat service can be easily added and customized as a consistent button on your website. Instead of scrolling down a dozen pages to find the support email or phone number to connect with the service team, customers just click the live chat icon and start chatting with the support agent. If customers can easily contact and receive support from service agents, they are more likely to refer your products or services to others.
Increase customer satisfaction
When using live chat, customers are provided with immediate support and have their issues solved quickly, without leaving their computer or switching to other tabs. They also don’t need to remember the phone number to call or wait for hours to get a response to their questions. Therefore, it can bring customer satisfaction with a support experience, and become one of the most preferred channels.
Generate more sales from each conversation
When customers contact an agent with a problem, the agent can build a strong relationship with empathy toward the customer while solving the problem. If customers receive a positive support experience through live chat, it can be a sales opportunity too, especially when it comes to reducing dropouts during the purchase process.
A recent study shows that live chat can increase 48% revenue per chat hour and a 40% increase in conversion rate. It’s no doubt that live chat has a strong influence on providing businesses with staggering results.
Top 6 live chat metrics that you need to measure
Let’s look at the key metrics you need to measure to have an in-depth understanding of your live chat performance.
Total number of chats
This metric measures the total number of chats opened, missed, and resolved conversations handled at any given period of time. It could be a day, a week, a month, or even a quarter of a year. The total number of chats could be influenced by the type of business, the time of year, the marketing effort, and the accessibility of your channels.
Here are a few tips for you to measure the total number of chats:
Track the total number of categories and set up the next steps and goals for each category:
- Opened: Aim to put opened chats into the resolved category
- Missed: Follow up
- Resolved: Try to get feedback about the products and service
- Unresolved: Figure out what makes customers not satisfied with
A small number of chats during the business time of the year could reflect the inefficiency of marketing or the inaccessibility of your chat. Meanwhile, a high number of chats could mean that your products or services are having problems, or your marketing effort is great.
Either situation could only give you the clearest answers by measuring the number of each category in the total number of chats, but not guessing.
FCR (First-contact resolution)
First contact resolution metrics refer to the ability to resolve customers’ problems questions, or needs when the first time they contact via your live-chat channels. This metric closely affects the Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and brand loyalty.
FCR metric depends on the efficiency of your agents, their skills, and product knowledge. Normally, the resolution time is around 70% or 75%. To improve the ability of agents, you need to hire the right persons, provide quality training, and give them the right tools they need to support your customers.
Average resolution time
Average Resolution Time (ART) is the average time that support agents spend on solving tickets. This metric is one of the factors that help businesses measure customer satisfaction when contacting through live chat.
The less average resolution time means that tickets need less time to solve customers’ questions when they start a conversation. On the other hand, a higher average resolution time refers to the longer time that support agents use to respond to the customer’s problem. It could mean that your agents are working less efficiently or they are handling too many messages at once.
There are some tips that you can use to improve your average response time:
- Use helpdesk software such as NestDesk that can integrate all your live chat from different channels to gather all messages in one place.
- Set up automation rules that can automatically reply to frequently asked questions.
- Train your agents with deep product and service knowledge to quick answers to customers’ problems.
Customer satisfaction score
The customer satisfaction score metric (CSAT) is used to measure customer satisfaction level towards a product or service or the whole business. CSAT is often measured on a five-point scale, from “Very dissatisfied” to “Very satisfied”. By measuring CSAT regularly, you can have data to measure your customer behavior, collect feedback, and improve the overall customer experience.
There are some metrics you can measure to find out the level of satisfaction that customers have with your brand:
- First-contact resolution time
- Average resolution time
- Customer churn rate
- Conversion rate
To improve the overall CSAT, you can follow these tips:
- Improve support agent knowledge about products and services.
- Improve the speed of the first response
- Try to solve customer issues in only one engagement.
- Gather all messages in one place.
- Follow up with customers to fully resolve their issues.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate through live chat refers to the number of converted customers out of the total number of messages you receive in a period. It can be the number of buying customers, attending webinars, or signing up for ebooks and newsletters.
By tracking this metric, you will know whether the effort to turn messages into sales from your customer support agents is effective or not. However, if your conversion rate through live chat is low, there are some tips to improve it:
- Start a proactive conversation when they are on a specific page and resolve all their problem.
- Trigger personalized welcome messages (you can attach a coupon or discount for new customers) when customers visit your website.
- Use automation rules to ask preset questions to start a conversation.
- Provide agents with training and product knowledge to give customers the information they need about the
Net Promoter Score
This metric will tell you if a customer will recommend your products or services and show their loyalty to your business. It is also an important way to measure the relationship with customers and predict the possibility of re-buy and expedition through referrals.
NPS is measured on a 10-point scale:
- Detractors: 0 to 6 points means dissatisfaction.
- Passives: 7 to 8 there is the possibility that customers recommend your products to others.
- Promoters: 9 to 10 points meant that they are more likely that customers will recommend products to others. Furthermore, in comparison with Detractors, Promoters are 4.2 times more likely to buy again, 5.6 times more likely to forgive company mistakes, and 7.2 times more likely to try a new offering.
To improve NPS you can follow these tips below:
- Make it easy for people to share your brand by using a one-click social media share.
- Contact people who don’t like your products to find out what went wrong
- Provide proper training for customer support agents.
Measure and develop with your live chat
Providing customers with live chat tools can improve their overall experience, boost conversion, and increase customer loyalty to your business. To achieve these goals with live chat, you need software that can connect all your live chat from different channels into one place, and provide you with in-depth analytics about customer conversations and conversion.
NestDesk – A powerful customer support system that helps integrate all your live chat from Facebook, Messenger, and the Website into one place. Moreover, NestDesk provides you with more cool features to bring your customer support to the next level. It’s time to turn your exceptional customer support into a powerful sales channel with NestDesk.
Marketing Attribution 
