Support Centre relaunches Chat

Published by Marketing on

live chat

live chatOn 23 January 2019, the Support Centre’s new Chat platform was officially launched.

The new Chat platform

Having been soft trialled, the new Chat platform has already proven to work really efficiently.

‘An incoming Chat request immediately places a popup notification on all support centre screens advising a customer’s waiting,’ said Phil Gibbons, Support Manager. ‘We’ve been monitoring the soft launch closely. So far it’s been performing beyond expectation with customers’ support queries being resolved, quickly.’

Continuing, Phil added, ‘We’d planned to trial it to a select few customers, only, but it’s worked so well we’ve opened it to all customers.’

How is Chat used?

start a chatWhen a user logs into the Support Centre from Engage, a “Live Chat” label appears on the right hand side of the page. Clicking on the label and answering a few quick questions opens a chat dialogue on the Support Centre screens. The first free representative takes the call, whereupon all the key customer details are presented on their screen.

The chat label is available 24 hours a day. If no representatives are available when the tab is clicked, the user can complete a short form which raises a case, automatically.

Testing brought a smile

‘It’s quite funny,’ said Phil. ‘We had great difficulty testing Chat. Every time we turned it on, a school user would send us a question within 1 or 2 minutes, proving it worked! So, with testing not a real option and users obviously liking Chat, we decided to get on with it and launch as soon as we could.’

Two immediate success stories

A user contacted us on Chat with a quick census question which we were able to answer there and then, whilst attaching the two relevant guides for the customer to download. This was an immediate close of a very simple case.

Another quick question was if our technical staff provided support cover on Saturdays. Again, it was answered quickly with no case having to be raised.

How beneficial will Chat be?

Being so soon into the launch, it’s hard to quantify the benefits with any accuracy. However, time saving has been shown to be an obvious result with quick resolution of queries. Excellent for the user as well as our support staff.

‘Our objective had been simple,’ commented Phil. ‘To offer quick resolutions to queries, leading to improved relationships between users and support staff. A key benefit is that all the query information can be gathered quickly resulting in quicker resolution.’

The CTO says

On watching the soft trial, Paul Rastall, CTO, said, ‘I believe Chat will help remove many barriers between Engage users and our support staff, by making it faster and easier to have quick answers to simple questions. Removing the time gaps between support conversations will hopefully lead to faster responses. Of course, a user still has the option of making a phone call or raising a Support Case.’

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