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As often, with music never played on mainstream media; today I leave you with modern Tango from Buenos Aires, Argentina. https://youtu.be/mQusfSWFt6M?si=1BPajGEzRaisDq4O

Like many of you, I too worked as a rep and did chat support, I dont know how I survived it since being super fast is not my strong point and as you may notice, most companies ask that chat reps take care of several chats at a time.

Company owners and most managers call it “ fast paced environment” . I call it stressing out uselessly….

My logic is: how many customers do we gain by chatting super fast vs how many customers do we lose due to the floppiness and stress that inherently comes with attending several chats simultaneously?

After my first promotion and being able to decide on the course of the customer service team I was leading, I decided to cut away with that crazy and stressful habit I still see today in most other companies for this function.

I established a simple rule: 1 agent - 1 chat and the hell with all that stress.

There were a few other things I always noticed about chat support I never liked:

The chat systems I always worked with always ask the visitor for their names and email. So I made it very clear to my teammates to never ask their names as they stepped into the chat; this is a mistake I see often still today..They just have to read the name on the system and greet them accordingly. Its so annoying to have to say things twice ..

And so I also instructed team members to carefully read the visitor's message as to answer every single point brought up and never ever ask for something the visitor already expressed. I find this is the most annoying thing that happens to me as a customer.

And then a few years back, in the middle of Covid and given all the mess we had with shipment delays and Brexit-related issues, we often accumulated important chat waiting queues.

I thought it was a ripe time to bend my rule and have our kids take care of several chats but I thought of a better solution:

I suggested owners IT team code us some short games during the chat wait time both before an agent came in and in case we needed to make the visitor wait more than 45 seconds in the middle of a communication.

The games are all company product and culture related, fast and easily played and if the visitor wins they get a discount on any future purchase.

The reaction was a soaring success; too much actually; we got many more visitors and I was left with the same problem again! So I hired a few super fast 20 year olds that do just chat , and still on a 1 chat 1 customer basis but we get so many visitors its a great ROI, people love playing these easy games for discounts! And its an awesome opportunity to convert visitors into customers

Anyone else hate the stress that goes along with having to do several chats at the same time? How would you remedy this if you had budgetary restraints and couldnt hire more agents, how do you improve it as an agent?

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