Live Chat Overview

SmarterTrack's live chat feature gives businesses the ability to reduce phone calls, improve customer support, and assist customers in a way that they are more likely to use. Studies have shown that use of live chat as a customer service method has increased, year over year, since the explosion of mobile devices. Therefore, having that as an outlet will endear your customers to you, plus it can increase agent efficiency as they can handle multiple chats at one time. (Should you choose to allow them to.) Live chat can be set up so that users see relevant KB articles prior to submitting the chat to an agent, which could help reduce the amount of agent interaction that's required, helping reduce, or at least manage, your overall support costs.

Live chats can be started on the portal or directly from one or more pages of your website by integrating live chat using simple text links or icons, then adding fully customizable text and colors so that your live chat complements your site.

To access Live Chats within the management interface, log into SmarterTrack as an agent and select Live Chat from the navigator. Depending on the role you are assigned, an agent may only see My Active and My Completed tabs in the content pane, which shows all live chats that are currently assigned to them, or chats they have previously participated in. Managers and administrators have the ability to see all live chats -- active and/or completed -- across multiple departments, based on their permission level.

On the user's end, as they initiate the live chat process, after their initial questions is submitted they are presented with an intermediary page that lists a number of suggested solutions from relevant knowledge base articles within SmarterTrack. This can help keep support functions streamlined and concentrated by allowing the customer to see potential resolutions to their issues before the chat is submitted to an agent.

For more detail on the live chat interface, see the View Chat section of help.

Navigating SmarterTrack's Live Chat Interface

Agent Live Chats vs. Global Live Chats

The Live Chats section organizes all of the live chats for which an agent is responsible. When an agent accesses the live chat area by clicking on it in the navigator, all active live chats for the agent will load in My Active. Agents can also view any inactive chats that they have previously had with end users by selecting My Completed.

In addition, the Live Chats section organizes chats by group. That means that every group the agent is active in will be listed and the agent can drill down into each group to see their active and inactive chats.

Administrators and managers who are members of multiple groups may want to view active and/or inactive live chats for those groups to better evaluate the actual needs of the organization or to gain valuable insight into company operations. To view all live chats in SmarterTrack, an agent, manager or administrator MUST be a member of all groups within SmarterTrack. At the very least, they need to be members of multiple groups in order to see live chats for those groups. Once this is done, they will have access to view chats By Department or By Agent in the navigation pane.

Regardless of whether you're accessing your own live chats or global live chats, all active or completed chats in the system will load in the content pane when you open the respective live chat section. In general, the following information is displayed:

User - The name the customer would like to be called during the chat.
User Email - If the user provided an email address, it will be displayed. Otherwise, "No Email Address" will appear.
Group/Agent - The group to which the live chat was assigned, and the agent who handled the chat.
Started - The date and time the chat originally started.
Duration - The amount of time the chat lasted. For active chats, the idle time is displayed as well.

Sorting

Clicking on sorting icon in the content pane allows you to change how active and completed chats are displayed. Final sort order uses the chat's idle time as the deciding factor. For example, 3 chats from the same customer will sort from least idle to most idle, or vice versa, when sorting the User column in either ascending or descending order.

Performing Live Chat Actions

In general, the following options are available from Actions icon the content pane toolbar:

Select All - Selects all chats within the content pane.
Transfer - Transfers the selected chat(s) to another group or agent. For more information on transferring a live chat, see Transferring Live Chats.
Delete - Click this button to delete the selected live chat(s). For more information on deleted chats, see Deleting Live Chats.