Whenever devising the measurement parameters of the live chat performance, its best to define what your company considers important. Is it sales? Support? Or is there any other departmental focus? Clearly defining what is the most important for your company will assist you in creating the right metrics. A sales-based company might find the following metrics useful in measuring the effectiveness of its live chat system.

1. Number of visitor initiated chats

This is a powerful metric that helps you examine the analytics the pages visited before starting the chat invite. The information extracted from this metric will help the agent when configuring auto invitation chat rules along with devising agent generated proactive chats. The metric might also come useful in suggesting that visitors are encountering problems or lack of information on your website.

2. Number of agents initiated proactive chats

The metric will state the number of chats started by the live chat agents. Agents acquire customized training in proactively starting a conversation with a visitor who must have been navigating on your website page for some time, or perhaps they tend to visit a number of pages in a particular order. The agent will see which page or sequence of pages are displaying the need for initiating a live chat conversation.

3. Agent initiated proactive chat invitation acceptance rate

How responsive visitors are after watching the agent live chat invites pop up on their windows? The proactive invitation acceptance rate helps in you in assessing the communication expertise of the agents in starting the live chat, and if they are complying with the initiation guidelines. Sending live chat invites in an inappropriate and unprofessional manner can cut down the acceptance rate significantly. Agents need to study their proactive initiation strategy in order to see the visitors are targeted properly, i.e., navigation history, time spent, etc. The point is to locate potential visitors that are bound to make some healthy purchases.

4. Number of auto invitations initiated

For companies that register large numbers of website traffic, it becomes increasingly difficult for live chat agents to grab every other visitor for initiating proactive chats. Some business live chat softwares have the feature permitting auto invitations for website visitors. By customizing this feature an auto invite is created with the purpose of responding to visitor actions. This metric is particularly useful for agents to schedule live chat invites for the time of peak website traffic.

5. Auto invitation acceptance rates

As an agent, you will be interested to know the effectiveness of proactive chat initiations, as a professional you will also be required to know the visitor acceptance of auto invitations. The information attained can be used to adjust the rule and make relevant changes accordingly.

6. Sales conversion rates

What percent of accepted invites called for sales? It’s important to know the figures that resulted in sales. The number will instantly suggest how well the agent is trained, and if he/she requires additional sales training.

7. Average sales amount per conversion

This metric provides information regarding average dollar amount per sales conversion. Both the agent and the company can acquire this information to see if the goals are met. A deeper insight might also unearth opportunities for online upgrades or additional offers that would most likely enhance the customer’s experience like never before.

8. Customer satisfaction rating

Perhaps the most important of all the metrics: how are visitors rating their experience? The customer satisfaction rating tells you regarding the repeat visits and additional purchases, both the figures that have a direct impact on long term revenue for the business.

Author's Bio: 

Judy Alex is a very fine technical and research writer for latest technology & marketing trends. My job is to provide the best research and complete understanding of very new technology is developed. I have been associated with a top ranked live chat software for 6 years. In this tenure I have worked with many projects locally and internationally.