While many contact centers can boast multichannel communication, not every contact center ventures to every possible media. Chat is one of those avoided media for a number of reasons.
Many contact centers are nervous about the “immediacy” of chat. Unlike an e-mail or a phone call, you can't ignore a chat for 12 to 24 hours. Agents need to have their responses – correct ones – within minutes. In addition, many companies are uneasy about what they perceive to be security risks with chat, or at least administrative problems. E-mails can be pre-scripted and checked before they’re sent out. Chat, on the other hand, can be at the whim of an agent. A snippy, incorrect or inappropriate answer, sent in a split second, can't be retracted.
But the benefits of chat by far exceed the drawbacks, real or perceived. Customers today expect instant answers, and chat is good way to provide them without the hassle of a phone call. And unlike the telephone, agents can carry on several chats with different customers all at once. Agent accents, often a problem with telephone calls, are a non-issue with chat.
Tim Hillison, vice president of global marketing at NTRglobal, recently blogged about the benefits of chat in the contact center, splitting the perks into two categories: pre-sales and post-sales. Examples he provides of pre-sales benefits include the ability to convert Web prospects to sales faster, fostering a friendly, informal atmosphere between agent and prospect, creating a “stickier” Web experience, brand reinforcement and the ability to serve customers in their preferred language faster and easier with no call transfers.
For the post-sales benefits of chat cited by Hillison, these include the ability to provide standardized information without losing the informal touch, the ease with which modern chat features allow an agent to bring other subject matter experts into the conversation, real-time metrics and instant customer feedback and the ability to stay consistent with the chat regardless of where the agent or knowledge worker is located.