Outsourced live chat support
While the window is open
Live chat support is the fast line of a customer desk. Someone is in the window now: a sign-in that failed, a page that will not load, an order that stopped moving. The job is to meet them while they are still there, and to leave a line the next shift can trust.
Hearthvane does not publish a first-reply stopwatch. Speed matters, and so does not inventing a number for it. If you want to test a target of your own, use the SLA calculator. The result is your target, not a promise from this desk.
What stays in the chat
A short question with a checkable answer. Where the reset mail went. Whether a ticket already exists. Which page holds the return label. The reply names the fact, asks for one missing detail, and stops.
One missing detail is the rule. Five questions in one bubble produce a partial reply and a second round. Ask for the order number, or the browser, or the page they were on. Then wait in the same window.
What leaves the chat
A refund, an account change, or anything past the ceiling you set. The person is told, in the thread, that the case is now a ticket. The window is not left silent. A stuck case that dies in chat becomes a second complaint by morning. The longer account of that handoff is in how a support ticket gets closed.
How a thread is allowed to end
Answered, with the last line saying what was done. Waiting, with the one fact that was requested. Or moved, with a ticket that already has a subject and a next step. “Glad we could help” is not an ending.
A marked thread
This is an illustration, not a report of a real company. The person says the invoice page shows last month and will not move. The desk opens the same page, sees the date filter set to the previous month, and says so. It asks them to clear that filter once. They do, and the current month appears. The last line is: invoice page was filtered to last month, customer cleared it, current month visible. The thread ends there. No extra sentence about how much the company cares.
If the filter had not been the cause, the same thread would have become a ticket before the window closed, with the subject rewritten from “invoice” to “invoice page stuck on last month.”
Before the first chat shift
Three limits have to be written down, or the person in the window gets a guess.
What can be answered without leaving the thread. What must become a ticket even if the person is unhappy to wait. Whether any money can move, and the ceiling if it can. A night person who can refund anything will sometimes refund the wrong thing. A night person who can refund nothing will sometimes trap a three-dollar mistake until morning. The useful rule is the one you wrote, and it has to be the same on Tuesday and on Sunday.
To staff this line on your queue, get a quote. Say that the channel is chat, and say what the desk may not decide while the window is still open.
