Chat

[VOIPoTim]

Tim, with all due respect... my post here went three days with no response from anyone. No members saying "that's never happened to me" or "samething here." Nothing.

This post was in a customer discussion forum which is not an official medium for support. It's not something we monitor regularly...we just periodically check in on the forums. That's why you didn't receive a prompt response to your post here.

In terms of the chat, I understand your frustration if you have unanswered chats. I'm just saying that we handle so many chats every day that it's definitely a medium we do monitor and I'm not really what would cause them to be missed. During business hours, there are always chats going constantly. Like I said, I'm almost wondering if it could possibly be a browser issue or something of that nature. There's always the chance of a glitch with the software, a browser issue, or something like that and if we have an example it'll be easier to narrow it down. We definitely do monitor chats though.

It could also be a case where we employees are simply not answering the chats as they should and this is something I'm going to send out a reminder on internally. The chats are distributed in a round-robin fashion to one agent at a time (which is not the most efficient). If an agent does not answer it within a few seconds, it goes to the next one and keeps going until one answers. This is why sometimes you may get someone on the phone who does not get your chat request at the same time (it's waiting for another agent).

After the new vPanel rollout this week, we have some enhancments we're going to be working on for support including new chat software, a new employee structure for support, new support software which integrates all the data (so can see all your history of account changes and know what other agents have done without having to dig through it and keep your chats, tickets, calls etc all in one clean place to document it all) and some new quality assurance tools (quality surveys to isolate bad experiences or employees who need more training, etc). Once we upgrade the chat software, we'll have better access to analytics in terms of chat wait times and maybe then we can pinpoint any issues.

The chat software we're switching to has more stats and management-oriented tools (such as seeing a full list of all the waiting chats, etc) vs just a basic round robin interface and total chats taken stats (per agent).

That said, I did have an incident once where I got in the web chat queue shortly before chat support closed for the day. Support closed and presumably everyone went home with me still sitting in the queue waiting for a response.

Yes, hitting it right before closing is a possibility. The current chat software does not handle that well and it's something we're hoping to correct when we swap it out. I'm pretty confident we can resolve the closing time limbo situation once we do the swap.