TRAINING YOUR LIVE CHAT AGENTS: ESSENTIALS ELEMENTS OF THE TRAINING PROCESS

What if I ask you how’ll you train your live chat agents?

Your response would probably include statements like:

Make them familiar with the live chat platform they’ll be working on.
Educate them about the products and services that your business deals in.
Provide them an access to all that they require for resolving the customers’ queries (knowledge base, canned messages etc.)
Won’t you?

Well, that’s true but there’s something more that needs to be done. Here’s a checklist.

Channel your brand style guidelines into training material:
In order to train your live chat agents efficiently, you first need to work with your marketing or PR department. This should be followed by brainstorming sessions so as to create the best kind of training material.

You can make use of the types of questions you expect to receive and then ask the agents to respond to these questions. Once that’s done, you can point out what their responses should be like. In other words, you have to teach them to write the responses in a style that you require.

Leverage mock chats to train your live chat agents:
As they say: Practice makes a man perfect.

That’s exactly what the mock tests help to do. They help your live chat agents to get used to the live chat platform in a short time span.

All you have to make sure to make the most out of the mock tests is that you make them practice each and every aspect of the live chat software. For this, you’ll have to:

walk him/her through basic chat functions and using canned messages and links.
have the agent practice transferring you some files and links.
Make use of video tutorials for a better understanding:
Videos make understanding complex things an easy task. So, you can use the power of videos to make your live chat agents understand more complex processes.

You can either use the videos that you’ve created on your own or you can simply use the ones available on YouTube. These videos will help your chat agents grasp the complex concepts with an ease.

Train them on how to add a personal touch to the chats:
Apart from the technicalities, the live chat agents need to be trained in empathy and humor. They need to be taught about emotional intelligence.

Why: you ask us?

Well, that’s because the customers expect their answers to be answered by a live human. That’s exactly what the live chat agents can assure by being empathetic and injecting humor into the conversations.

Also, don’t forget to emphasize the importance of attentive listening. After all, that’s how they can get to know the root cause of the problem and provide the best solutions!