What key performance indicators can you apply to a live chat support team? Let’s see some of the KPIs used by Open Access BPO’s non-voice customer service unit.
A live chat support team is, in a manner of speaking, like a call center team— they both attend to chat customers and provide solutions to product-related concerns sent via their respective channels. The performance of both chat support representatives and call center agents are measured to ensure that all team members comply with the set rules and guidelines, and meet customer service standards.

This is why chat-based customer support teams use the same key performance indicators (KPI) used in voice-based work. These include:

•   Number of available agents

•   Number of chats/tickets on queue

•   Average handle time

•   Session (chat) abandonment rate

•   Hold time

•   Answer time

There are, however, certain metrics that uniquely measure the performance of chat support representatives. There are also some that gauge the efficiency of chat programs as part of a multi-channeled call center solution. Here are some of those KPIs:

• Percentage of customers who initially contacted chat support

This counts the number of customers who used chat as the primary channel to reach a company to ask for assistance.

• Percentage of cases resolved in chat

As the name suggests, this is the number of successfully resolved problems that were sent and processed through chat.

• Live chat to voice switch rate

This measures the percent of chat sessions that transfer to phone-based agents. This metric can also find out whether the transfer is due to the customer’s dissatisfaction with the non-voice tool or the necessity to use calls after chat to complete the transaction.

• Average concurrent chat sessions

This KPI indicates the average number of customers a representative handles all at once. As the capability to simultaneously conduct multiple sessions is one of the key benefits of live chat, this metric can tell if the tool can prove its promised economic advantage.

• Maximum concurrent chat sessions

Instead of the average, this counts the most number of customers an agent can attend to at one time. This mainly measures a representative’s ability to utilize live chat’s multitasking feature, and it also determines the number of sessions that each agent is assigned with.

Using call center KPIs to measure the performance of non-voice agents is a wise move for companies that want to monitor and assess the performance of their employees accurately. Getting the most out of live chat, however, requires a wise combination of voice-applicable and chat-specific KPIs.