WebGreeter Live Chat Service is one of the subsidies of
LiveAdmins LLC. WebGreeter was the first business started by LiveAdmins just under a decade ago and has since been providing Live Chat Support Services to online businesses.
WebGreeter™ operates as a chat service contact center which, like any call center, provides services through multiple locations to multiple client websites, all over the world. Until recently, the service deployment and daily operational structure has focused on first training operators to use off-the-shelf chat software and then training them to understand our clients’ website and business. Following the successful completion of this two-part training, these operators are deployed to provide services on WebGreeter’s client websites.
WebGreeter™ uses a customer focused strategy whereby their clients define the parameters of service. This service could include everything from administrative work (like setting appointments online) to sales and after-sales support work (including lead generation, closing sales, after sales support and customer complaints management).
WebGreeter™ has previously been using a combination of the more popular existing chat solutions in order to deliver the service. These off-the-shelf software solutions had major inadequacies when it came to fulfilling WebGreeter’s needs. The following is a discussion of the main factors relating to off-the-shelf solutions;
Did not Provide Automatic Chat Routing
Operators had to pick chats out of a visitor list themselves, while the list itself contained visitor traffic from all the websites receiving the chat service from WebGreeter™. This meant that operators had to be careful when picking chats as they could only pick the ones for websites they had been trained for. Another factor that affected performance was the greeting-wait factor, where operators had to find their chats themselves, greet visitors and then be forced to wait for a response.
Did not Provide the Ability to Link and Manage Disperse Human Resources Automatically
With contact centers in Chicago, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, operators could provide 24/7 coverage to websites, with one center overlapping with another so that timing differences did not affect the service delivery. Coordinating these human resources, however, was a difficult and time consuming job. Load balancing (switching human resources to manage higher traffic volumes on client websites) was being performed manually by supervisors who were forced to remain on international calls for much of their time, talking to supervisors and operators at other locations. For this reason, work division was a very difficult task to manage on a day to day basis.
Did not Provide Automatic Reports
Traffic reports, sales conversion reports, chat-reports and such were generated using individual statistics maintained and updated daily by operators and their supervisors. These reports were of high importance as they were necessary for the improvement of the service and were a major tool required to help WebGreeter™ and its clients review the effectiveness of the service. Compiling and sharing these reports in a meaningful way was a time consuming task.
Did not Save and Retrieve Previous Chats with Visitors who Returned to the Webpage
Operators providing the service had to manually copy and paste chats in a document in order to save them after a chat was concluded. Transcripts of the previous chats that had been conducted with a returning visitor had to be looked up manually. There was no one-click approach to recognize a returning visitor and to retrieve their previous conversations with WebGreeter™ operators.
Did not provide room for improvement
The processes being used to deploy and deliver services on a day to day basis were mostly manual. There was little or no room for improvement as these processes were already optimized and still showed major deficiencies. WebGreeter™ was forced to deal with limitations which had nothing to do with the company itself, only the technology at hand.
The WG Live Chat Software™ was initially developed for use by WebGreeter™ and has since been licensed to many web-businesses which have benefited immensely from the features provided in the application. The following segment describes how the application has helped WebGreeter™ streamline its service deployment and delivery, reduced their costs and helped the company become a more recognized brand.
Saving Valuable Time for Operations
ARS (Automatic Routing System)
The Automatic Chat Routing System connects visitors with waiting operators. The system routes chats to operators automatically from amongst the visitor list and with respect to;
- • The operator’s language ability (in case of bilingual or multilingual support)
- • Training levels (the most well trained and competent operators get chats first – and also a higher number of chats - as they are higher on the preference list)
- • Availability
Before the implementation and deployment of WG Live Chat Software™, operators were spending the majority of their time simply searching for visitors on the websites they were responsible for, from amongst the long list of traffic, and then simply greeting visitors and waiting for responses. With the new system in place, the routing system automates this process for the operator.
- • The system picks out a relevant visitor and sends the greeting automatically.
- • The actual chat only starts when the visitor shows enough interest to respond to the greeting.
- • This saves the time the operators had previously been using to find and wait on visitors to begin chatting.
- • It provides operators with the time and room to focus on quality and also ultimately conduct more relevant (result oriented) chats.
Saving valuable time for management
Managing and coordinating resources is now a simple process of tweaking the routing criteria in the system. WebGreeter™ supervisors now have the ability to monitor operators and make necessary changes using the application’s management panel. Since the routing system is capable of work division on a global scale, it automatically directs the use of available human resources according to the schedule of service, the traffic requirements and international timing differences. This reduces the management’s involvement in the operations aspect to a supervisory and directive level and allows them to benefit WebGreeter™ in other areas in the longer run; saving on time and costs, and leaving the managers at WebGreeter™ free to undertake other projects relating to training and service improvement etc.
Reducing Cost Overheads
Extra costs which were being incurred every month for various reasons have been dramatically reduced with the deployment of the application. Some of these extra costs in terms of time and resources were a burden upon an otherwise efficient and well designed operating process.
Cost Factors
• Use of extra bandwidth for internal phone conferences (VOIP was being used to coordinate human resources, a task which is now automated by the application). Extra bandwidth was also being wasted on dead chats; where visitors were not responding but were connected with the operators, meaning that the operators had to spend time, system and internet resources while waiting on responses.
• Wastage of the Management’s time developing reports on the service is now being eliminated as these reports are generated by the system and only require human review. The time spent in solving low level problems is also now being saved as these problems are no longer encountered due to computerization.
• The productivity of Chat Operators at WebGreeter™ has improved by 70%, i.e. WebGreeter™ can now provide their clients with 70% more completed relevant chats (leads generated) on their website as operators are getting more chats with better sales prospects. This has improved the efficiency of WebGreeter’s operators to the extent that the current teams are now managing 40% to 50% more work within the same time shifts compared to pre-implementation performance.
Automatic updates and streamlined processes
• Changes to chatting scripts and canned (pre-stored standard text) messages are now implemented in real-time (saving the time previously required to download update files and implement them across the board).
• This system is light, that is, it is .NET based and works well in any environment while using minimal bandwidth and system resources, removing the unnecessary delays and hang-ups associated with older versions of Java, PHP or flash based programs.