Login
Book a Demo
6 KPIs to Measure Your Live Chat Performance
If you can’t measure your live chat performance, chances are you have zero visibility of how this tool is driving conversions and conversations. This blog walks you through key metrics to take note of, and how to best track your conversation tool.
Live chat is a great way for businesses to have real-time conversations with customers and drive revenue. It’s also a great form of customer service as it allows users to quickly contact your business for swift answers.
However, unless you’re efficiently monitoring your live chat, it’s difficult to find out what’s working and what isn’t. Without a clear cut live chat strategy to grow your business, how can you improve it?
💡 Pro Tip
Want to learn exactly how to track the impact of your live chat? Read our guide to live chat tracking (no download necessary) to see how you can track each step your customer takes pre and post live chat conversation.
Keep reading to learn:
Let’s get stuck in!
Measuring live chat isn’t easy. While live chat tools often provide reporting and analytics to measure things like average chat duration, you’ll struggle to find more than that.
The thing with live chat tools is that they’re expensive. So, you’ll want to be sure you’re getting a return on your investment.
However, when a user enters a chat, how can you ensure you can track if they convert and how live chat plays a role in driving revenue?
Without a tool that offers marketing attribution, you’ll always be a little stuck here.
But, let’s look at the key metrics you’ll want to measure to understand your live chat performance.
So you want to measure the impact of your live chat?
Here are 6 key metrics that you need to measure to understand the effectiveness of your live chat tool:
While live chat is frequently used for customer service, it’s also a great way to kick-start the buyer’s journey. From an awareness perspective, users can use your live chat to get answers and find a solution to the issue they have without having to leave too much contact information. Your sales agents could be recommending particular products, or even scheduling sales meetings via live chat.
If you’re not tracking the revenue that live chat is helping to convert, then how can you fully justify the spend?
Enter marketing attribution.
Ruler Analytics can track conversions and conversations. It means you can track live chat conversations as part of a full customer journey. Remember, we have a whole host of integrations too. From ZenDesk to Intercom, Drift, LiveChat, Purechat and Sendinblue.
PS: Not sure how this works? Download our eBook to learn how you can track your leads that come through live chat.
One key metric for qualifying your live chat performance is the number of chats you receive on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
For one, this will help you allocate your sales team efficiently when you’re receiving the most live chat requests. But more importantly, it allows you to get a better understanding of what your users need help with.
By analysing your live chat responses, you may find certain questions cropping up regularly. At that point, it might be worth writing a blog to answer that question to free up your agent’s time. Or, you might find your website is drawing a lot of interest from a particular industry. This can help you adjust your marketing strategy so that you’re attracting the right audience. By understanding the content of your users’ live chat sessions, you can adjust to get more high-quality leads.
Related: Learn how to track live chat conversations in Google Analytics
First response time is what it says on the tin. It’s the amount of time your sales agents take to respond to a live chat request.
To start, monitor the response time on live chat as a whole. The lower your response time, the more effective the chat will be. Nobody likes being left on read after all.
Then, look at your agent’s response time averages. It could identify a team member who might need extra resources or training to get the most out of the platform.
Don’t forget to look at first response time in terms of days and hours too. It could be that agents are being overwhelmed with chat requests at a certain time of the day. You can support them by bringing on more agents during peak times and ensuring live chat requests aren’t left unanswered.
While we don’t want to shoo users away from the live chat, we do want to resolve their query as quickly as possible. Monitoring average chat length is a good indicator of live chat performance as a whole.
Short chats indicate a good knowledge of product solutions and efficient support, while longer chats could indicate the potential for improvement.
Understanding which topics take the longest to resolve is a good way to understand if more resources are needed. Perhaps your sales team would benefit from screen share explainer videos.
While you might have a low response time, and a huge volume of chats, how satisfied are those users?
A simple post-chat survey will help you to identify the percentage of users who get a satisfactory response.
If you see poor results come streaming in, then you know you need to assess your live chat performance and make changes to improve it. If it’s not working for your users, then it needs an overhaul.
According to LTV Plus, live chat can help increase conversions by 12%. Tracking this metric is beneficial as it means you can convert users into leads by using engagement through personalised messages. Direct chat is a great way to resolve customer queries and to direct a user to sales.
Live chat is an essential tool whether you’re looking to improve customer service or if you want to speak to potential customers and signpost them to useful products and pages.
Related: 14 best live chat tools for marketers to consider in 2021
Understanding your live chat performance will allow you to identify customer pain points, gain valuable feedback and push your business forward.
By monitoring the metrics listed above, you’ll be able to leverage your live chat platform to make customers happy and get them started on their buyer’s journey.
Live chat isn’t the only conversion that’s tricky to track. There are phone calls, emails and even store visits to contend with. Thankfully, you don’t have to guess your marketing’s impact on these conversions any longer!
Download our offline conversion tracking eBook to see how you can link every single touchpoint back to the marketing campaign that influenced it.
