Chat Routing Analytics - More Data to Manage Volume

Since launching Chat Routing earlier this year, customers have seen a marked improvement in three key areas:

• Reduction in the number of missed chats,
• Increase in agent productivity, and
• Improvement in overall customer satisfaction

These were all metrics we aimed to improve, and we’re heartened to see customers having success with this feature.

Our next phase of Chat Routing - launching today - is an upgrade of the reporting metrics for assigned chats. Before today it wasn’t possible for team admins to monitor the performance of agents being assigned chats. A couple of the questions being asked included:

• How many assigned chats is an agent taking?
• How many more agents do I need to serve chat?

To address these two questions, we’ve developed two new metrics for Zopim Analytics - Acceptance and Capacity.

Acceptance metric - Monitor agent uptake of chats

The Acceptance metric is quite straightforward, it’s simply the ratio of assigned chats that have been accepted by an agent.

Here’s how we calculate it:

Let’s say over the course of a day 30 chats were assigned to Agent A and 50 to Agent B.

Agent B had simpler customer queries and managed to accept 40 chats. But, Agent A had much more complex requests and was only able to take 20 chats. The Acceptance rates of the two agents would be:

• Agent A: 20 Accepted / 30 assigned = 67% Acceptance Rate
• Agent B: 40 Accepted / 50 assigned = 80% Acceptance Rate

To see this stat go into Analytics and hover over the bar graph.

You can also see it in the Agent Leaderboard.

Of course you need to be on the Advanced Plan to see Zopim Analytics.

Capacity (Beta) - Anticipate and plan for chat volume

Capacity is more interesting as it is intended to be a suggestive metric, rather than an objective stat.

Capacity represents the theoretical amount of chats your entire account can handle, based on the following three factors:

1. The number of agents logged in,
2. The average chat duration, and
3. The chat limit of the agent

Using the three metrics, our algorithm is able to predict how many chats (in theory) your account can handle in a given period of time, provided your agents are operating at optimum efficiency. This will be immensely useful to your admin staff in planning for future deployment and agent staffing.

Note that this metric is in beta as we are currently not able to determine the historical agent chat limit. We are working on improving this, but the Capacity metric should be useful and accurate for most cases.

To enable Capacity, you’ll need to click the "..." button at the top right of Zopim Analytics followed by "Enable Capacity (beta)"

A whole bunch of other updates

Over the past few months, we’ve also used much of the feedback from our customers to make a few key improvements to Chat Routing:

Select Agent Status - Invisible or Away

We now let you select whether an agent’s status should automatically become Invisible or Away when they don’t respond to a set of assigned chats and those chats get reassigned.

The difference between the two status’ is that, if all agents are not responding and they become Invisible then the chat widget will go offline and customers will not be able to start a chat. If the status becomes Away then the chats will no longer be assigned to those agents, but the chat widget will remain active.

While some will see the benefit of setting the status to Invisible (especially when all the agents aren’t able to take chats), by setting the agent status to Away you’ll ensure that the chat widget does not accidentally go offline.

Improving the “Fairness” of our Routing Algorithm

We heard a lot of feedback that agents with multiple chats were being assigned even more, while agents with no chats were sitting idle. Initially our algorithm was fairly straightforward, chats would be distributed evenly to the agent with the least.

However, this did not work in all situations, which led to the aforementioned issues of fairness. To address this problem we’ve overhauled the manner in which incoming chats are distributed to agents.

Incoming chats are still assigned to the agent currently serving the lowest number of chats. But, if multiple agents are tied for the lowest number, the chat is assigned to the agent who's been available (i.e not serving a chat) for the longest period of time.

This should distribute chats more evenly, but please leave us your feedback and thoughts.

Improving Notifications in Zendesk

If you were using the Zopim Integration with Zendesk you may have had a hard time seeing the incoming chat notifications. We’ve improved this with a better popup notification that is easier for agents to see.

We'd like to hear your feedback on how Chat Routing works and the improvements we've made.