iAdvize is now operational on your website, congratulations! You already have the opportunity to chat with visitors. Now that you are accustomed to using the discussion panel, you would surely like to enhance your use of the chat solution... great! You're at the right place to find out how to boost your productivity and master the art of chatting. 

The 4 following indicators are here to help you track and analyze your productivity: 

1. Average time taken by agents to reply to a visitor's first message (1st Msg. RT in the solution)
2. Average handling time for a conversation (AHT in the solution)
3. Time to end a conversation (Last msg. CT in the solution) 
   
4. Number of contacts initiated by visitors who didn't receive an answer from an agent 

This data is available and detailed in the Contacts - Responsiveness report whose display can be filtered by time or agent for example.

Here are some of the concrete actions you can perform to boost your productivity:

1. Quickly respond to a visitor's 1st message and seize all opportunities that may arise

To achieve a high satisfaction rate, we recommend agents should not take more than 30 seconds to answer a visitor's first message. You are there already? Congrats! If you are still taking a bit longer to answer your visitors, here is what you can do: 

• Enable visual and audible alerts in Engagement > Settings > Chat. For visual notifications, you need to check if they are allowed by your browser.  
  
  IMPORTANT: These alerts will allow you to be immediately notified as soon as a visitor sends a message.

• Adjust the maximum number of simultaneous conversations agents can have. For agents who are accustomed to using the discussion panel, they can handle from 3 to 4 conversations simultaneously. For beginners, you can choose to have 1 to 2 simultaneous conversations.
  
  If your response time is high, reducing the number of conversations handled simultaneously can help you better detect new conversations. 
• Set a default welcome message. An automatic response that you have personalized will be immediately sent to visitors who initiate contact. In this message, you can insert the name of the agent in contact with the visitor. 
  
  This is the best way to reduce the response time to the first message. It also is an interesting way to show your interlocutor that you are available and that you are taking their request into account. Remember that these automatic messages may not correspond to all situations. And after an automatic message, you always need to react to your customers' requests to offer them the best answer. 

As for the number of contacts initiated but not answered, it should only be accidents! This type of situation is disappointing for all visitors, and it can have a negative impact on your brand image and the user experience on your website. 

Be alert!

Additional tips:

• If you are away for more than 10 minutes, log out from the iAdvize discussion panel.
• If you are away for less than 10 minutes, you can update your presence status by switching to the "Busy" mode (Red on the switch button of each channel).
   

2. Efficiently handle conversations

8 minutes is an ideal length of a conversation (it also depends on your industry of course). Here are some solutions that can help you reach this objective: 

• Master the conversation panel and its chat window. For example, it is essential to know how to manage your status (available/busy) on the discussion panel. We have many articles available in our Help Center for agents to read.
• Define and use canned content. Here are some examples of canned content you can use:
  
  
  • Canned answers. For example, these responses can contain the agent's pseudonym.
  • Pre-recorded links
  • Pre-recorded offers
    
    Once configured, this piece of content will be directly accessible from the conversation panel in order to be easily sent to visitors. Such a feature will allow you to save a lot of time during your conversations while offering you a response adapted to your interlocutors. The use of canned content is particularly adapted to your needs if you offer a particular or dense piece of content. 
• Smart Answers. These are answers suggested to you by the platform according to the history of past conversations you have had. These suggestions have been designed to best fit the context of your conversation. 
  
  Using them will help you save some valuable time!
• Be proactive during a conversation. To ensure that, you can:
  
  
  • Make sure that the answer you are giving meets the visitor's needs. This way, you will avoid a maximum of misunderstandings while improving the quality of your responses! 
  • Rekindle the conversation with your interlocutor approximately 45 seconds after the last message sent by them or you. Here are some examples to do so:
    • "Did I answer your question?" Use it sparingly, of course, you don't want to automate your conversations ;)
    • "I'm currently looking for information to answer you at best, I'll come back to you as soon as possible." 
• Adjust the maximum number of simultaneous conversations agents can have. For agents who are accustomed to using the discussion panel, they can handle from 3 to 4 conversations simultaneously. For beginners, you can choose to have 1 to 2 simultaneous conversations.
  
  If your response time is high, reducing the number of conversations handled simultaneously can help you better concentrate on ongoing conversations. 
• Transfer the visitor to another agent if the latter can better respond to the visitor.
  This is the best thing you can do if you realize that are not suited to answer the topic discussed or if you are caught up with a phone call. 
  
  This way, visitors will appreciate the quality of the response given as a more suited agent will help them and you will be available to better help other visitors. 
• Handle written and voice interactions separately as much as possible! More precisely, try to assign emails and chat conversations (as well as social media) to a selection of agents. And ask other agents to handle phone calls in parallel. 
  
  The implementation of planning with equitable time slots per agent is advised to guarantee a good balance within your teams. 

3. Master the art of ending a conversation 

 2 minutes and 30 seconds after the last message sent by a visitor, you can end a conversation. It's an important and essential lever to improve your productivity. Acting this way, you will make yourself available again to interact with other visitors! The solution is displayed on a website only when agents are available to chat, except when it comes to asynchronous channels, in this case, it is displayed when no one is logged in to the platform. 

Here are some pieces of advice:

• Be warned! It is true that quickly ending a conversation may not seem natural at first. 
  
  
  • Attention is slackened at the end of the discussion so we don't necessarily think about closing it.
  • It is no concern for the user experience. If the conversation is over, the chat window won't be closed on the visitor side: they can always send new messages to an agent that would be available to chat while keeping their conversation history.
    For agents talking with visitors who already have had a conversation, they can always have a look at the customer file on the discussion panel and access the history of past conversations to better understand the subject of their new conversation.
  • You can use the mirroring feature to see what the visitor will do after the conversation. 
    
    Keeping these pieces of advice in mind will allow you to be proactive to end a conversation at the right time. 

• Adapt to visitor behaviour. You can generally encounter 2 types of situation:
  
  
  1. Visitors leave on their own initiative. Then you can end the conversation with a greeting.
  2. Visitors don't respond anymore. You can frequently encounter this situation as visitors are often less polite during conversations via messaging than via face to face. Moreover, they can be looking at other websites at the same time. They are doing several things at the same time, don't take it personally or in a negative way ;)
     Here's how you can know more about your visitor's situation:
     
     
     1. After 1 minute without any answer from you, don't hesitate to rekindle the conversation. i.e. "Without an answer from you, I'll soon be ending our conversation to interact with other visitors who need help". 
        
        Remember to save this sentence in the library available in the iAdvize administration to save some precious time. 
     2. After 2 minutes and still no answer, leave the conversation you have had with the visitor. i.e. "As agreed, I'm ending this conversation. You will then be able to answer our satisfaction survey. Feel free to contact us again if need be. Thanks a lot and see you soon on our website". After your message, you can also send an automatic message. 

4. Alerting: real-time monitoring

In addition to implementing all the recommendations mentioned above, as a manager, you have the possibility to monitor the activity of your agents with visitors in real-time. You can do so by going to Reporting, and then selecting the Supervision part. 

On this interface which presents several performance indicators (please refer to the article explaining the Supervision tab), you can also configure visual alerts and objectives. In the People tab > Objectives. These alerts are displayed if: 

• The conversation is superior to a defined duration
• The response time between 2 interactions is superior to a defined duration

When you visualize an alert, you can warn your agents so that they can react in response to it. But you can also access the agent's discussion panel to have a look at the conversation and chat privately with the agent concerned. You will find more information about this topic in this article about the supervisor.
 

5. Measure your productivity

Your productivity can be measured in details in Reports > Contact Responsiveness, which display can be filtered by time or agent for example. 

In this example, you can see the performance by an agent on the Chat channel for the last 30 days. The graph displays the average handling time per day after modification: the default display is per week. By moving the mouse over the graph, you will see the daily data per day appear.