When to Hire Your First Online Chat Support Employee

At the start of any business, it is very common that the founders are responsible for everything. Filling out orders, answering clients questions, meeting with partners, analyzing reports, and all other tasks involved. Thus, knowing when is the right moment to free some of your time currently being dedicated to providing customer service is crucial. If there is one thing that scales parallel to your business’ growth, it’s the number of potential customers with questions.

As you get more visitors, your number of support requests will increase, that’s an undeniable truth. At first, you may be able to supply all of this demand, but eventually, it’ll start taking precious time that should be dedicated to building your business. You’ll either find yourself answering questions for most of the day or losing customers due to the delay in responses. That is the first sign you should start thinking of hiring your first support employee.

Self-service and choosing the right solution#

Before hiring an employee to take care of your customer’s demands, it’s important to ensure you’re using the right support solution for your website and providing self-service customer support to your visitors. It is possible you may be getting overwhelmed by visitors because you’re not making use of the right tools.

Start by creating an easily accessible knowledge base, such as an FAQ, on your website. That will allow visitors to have their basic questions answered without the need to take any time from you or future support representatives.

Also, ensure you’re using a complete and professional online chat solution, such as JivoChat. You must be able to configure bots for newsletters and automated responses, as well as provide alternative contact methods, such as e-mail tickets, whenever no agent is available.

If you’re still getting high support demands after employing these practices, that’s another sign that you should start thinking of hiring your first chat support employee.

Customer support ROI#

Hiring a person to address your customer’s issues means creating new expenses for your company, obviously. Still, the Return on Investment (ROI) for customer support and service is one of the highest. Once you hand this crucial task to somebody competent and ready to deliver high-quality service and satisfy your customers, you can focus on growing your business in order to keep increasing the number of visitors on your website.

When hiring the first customer support agent, be patient and look for the right person. The employee must be experienced, able to single-handedly relief this task from your shoulders and be a self-starter, finding not so easily accessible information by himself and making decisions based on the provided guidelines.

Hiring customer support agents will result in high ROI whenever it’s possible to increase productivity, guarantee customer satisfaction and impact sales. As a manager, through the use of complete customer service solutions, such as JivoChat, you’ll be able to generate reports and keep track of how much your representative is impacting your business, as well as following feedback received from customers.

Be available in peak hours#

By taking into your own hands the responsibility of addressing your customers’ questions and demands through an online chat on your website, at least at the beginning of your business, you’ll be able to determine which are the peak hours you need your online chat to be available.

Also, if your business gets support requests at different times every day, and you’re considering to work alongside your first chat support employee, you could instead choose to turn your service 24/7.

By doing this, you’ll be able to choose which hours of your day you’d like to dedicate to answering your clients' demands and when it would be best for your representative to take over. Also, you can use your own chat sessions to train your first employee.

Calls and text or just text?#

That is an important question that must be answered when lining up your support department with the rest of your business. Do you plan to be available only through chat messages or are customers allowed to call your representatives? By choosing the latter, you will need to consider how many calls a single representative can address at a time.

On average, one chat support employee may be able to address up to 3 visitors through chat questions without leaving any of them waiting for a prolonged amount of time or unsatisfied. While through calls, a single representative can only address one customer at a time.

Still, being available on both chat channels and calls is the expected in today’s market, being the right choice. Customers are not always willing to text your representatives through an online chat platform, sometimes they’d prefer to have their questions answered in a more dynamic and direct way through phone calls.

Fortunately, complete solutions such as JivoChat allows you to connect your business phone and receive incoming calls with your team. With an all-in-one platform, you’ll be able to communicate by chat, email, phone, as well as generate reports from these different channels.

Should you hire multilingual employees?#

Remember, hiring a multilingual support representative requires more investment. Besides, for text channels, it is possible to make use of translation tools that allow your representatives to address any customer in their own language.

JivoChat offers a native translation tool with all Google translate languages available. All it takes is to select the desired language, enable to translation tool and type in your own language. The customer will automatically receive the text translated. That is a cheaper and more practical solution than hiring multilingual employees.

JivoChat can help you manage your support team#

Want to know how well your agents are performing? JivoChat gives you all the numbers, chat logs and reports, facilitating overseeing the quality of service provided by your representatives. Allowing you to work closely together with your team and improve through the use of real feedback.

JivoChat is also entirely compatible with mobile through its applications, not letting your business lose any customer in need of help while on the move. Before hiring your first chat employee, ensure you’re using the best online chat solution in the market. JivoChat is free for up to 5 agents.