How to provide better live chat at scale: introducing Zopim Premium

[Editor’s note: Zopim is now Zendesk Chat]

Customer service is all about the connection forged between a support agent and his customer. But as a business grows and expands its support team, it becomes harder to maintain the same level of personalized service customers expect. Admins have too many agents to manage, and it’s tough to gain insight into their productivity and performance. In sum, companies trying to achieve scale face a whole new set of problems.

In the past year, the designers and product managers on our Zopim team have been working closely with customers of their live chat product, trying to understand the challenges they face and developing solutions that can make their customer service operations more efficient.

This culminated with the launch of a couple of new Zopim features that improved the Advanced plan offering. But today we’re taking things further. We’re excited to introduce a completely new Zopim plan that is designed to help growing businesses scale their live chat operations.

Introducing Zopim Premium
Zopim Premium helps businesses provide exceptional customer support while they grow. The new plan will include workforce management tools, the ability to scale your operation, and greater customizability. These features will equip support team managers with the tools they need to manage customer expectation and agent productivity.

Zopim Premium is available today, and here are some of the things that upgrading customers can look forward to.

Greater efficiency. As your business scales, there are two fundamental customer support principles you must keep in mind. First, always be where your customers are. This means using tools such as Facebook’s Businesses on Messenger to have real-time conversations with customers on their preferred platform. Second, as you begin to receive more chats and increase your agent count, you’ll need to come up with better strategies that are backed by quantitative metrics.

An increase in chat volume can take even the best customer support team by surprise. Zopim Premium is designed to provide managers with greater insight into their operations so they can manage customer expectation and agent productivity while remaining efficient at scale.

New Agent Reports let you manage your support team better by providing data on agent log in and service timings, performance rankings, satisfaction scores, and chat metrics. Notice a sharp increase in missed chats? Find the cause by looking at which agents were serving at that time and if there was a sudden spike in chat requests.

Scalability. As your business grows, it becomes a challenge to provide support for your increasing customer base. Zopim Premium features like real-time chat queue monitoring, increased security, and better Web infrastructure will solve your scalability problem.

The benefits of being able to track essential metrics at a single glance can be instrumental for your business. Real-Time Monitoring offers metrics on customer satisfaction, chat queue activity, and agent load—helping ensure you meet your SLAs and even detect potential problems before they escalate.

Currently, Real-Time Monitoring is great as a wall dashboard and gives managers a quick overview of their operation. But this is just the beginning. In the coming months, we’ll be improving Real-Time Monitoring to include greater customization options and drill-down options for greater utility.

24/7 support. Problems can arise at the most inopportune moments, and as a business, it’s always priority-one to return the situation to status quo. That’s why we’re extending our support hours to cover weekends, ensuring you’ll receive help whenever you need it.*

The new Zopim Premium plan comes with these and many other features to make managing your growing support team much easier.

Beautifully simple
With the launch of Zopim Premium we’ve built an affordable offering for larger teams interested in deploying live chat. But, it’s one thing to provide comprehensive features that solve customer woes and another to bring it all together in a beautifully simple package. Not only is Zopim’s Premium Plan packed with advanced tools to help you scale, they are all simple to use and easy to understand.

Zopim Premium is available now: Zopim customers can upgrade from their current plans, and Zendesk customers that use Zopim chat can contact their Zendesk representative to upgrade

* If you’re using Zopim within the Zendesk interface, your support level will remain the same as your current Zendesk package. So, for example if you are on Zendesk Enterprise or Elite and Zopim Premium, you will get 24/7 support over phone, email, and chat. This will prevent confusion over support hours on different Zopim and Zendesk plans, keeping things beautifully and simple.

This is a blog post about how to use live chat as a channel for customer service and/or sales support. Please visit www.zopim.com if you’d like to learn more about Zopim Live Chat by Zendesk, a live chat software tool that is used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide.