Chat monitoring: faster, easier, and more efficient than call listening

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Logging, listening to, and analysing customer service conversations across the contact centre is essential. Monitoring conversations offers a core way to identify common issues. It allows you to locate areas for improvement, and get a clear idea of agent performance.

In turn, then, conversation monitoring creates opportunities to improve service and increase customer satisfaction, retention, and advocacy.

And when it comes to overseeing customer communication, monitoring chats is more straightforward than call listening for contact centres. Here’s why.


The two core conversation monitoring tools

Real-time customer conversations in the contact centre happen over one of two channels: call or live chat. So, the primary tools used to monitor these conversations are:

  • Call listening: allows supervisors to listen to the phone call conversations a customer has with an agent.
  • Chat monitoring: the tool used to oversee live chat-based conversations. It allows supervisors to watch customer service chats as they unfold and review them after the conversation at any time.

But of the two, only one allows for easy search and high efficiency. Chat monitoring shines as the superior option.


Where chat monitoring is better than call listening

·         Speed

To monitor or review a conversation using call listening, a supervisor must sit through and listen to the entire conversation. To oversee multiple call-based conversations, they must listen to every one of them.

With chat monitoring, supervisors can skim and scan conversations — and then choose only to read the ones that need full attention.

This makes for a much faster process for monitoring customer conversations.

·         Ease

Call listening is also far less simple to use effectively than chat monitoring. With chats, the transcripts of conversations can be easily searched for keywords, or by sentiment score, or by agent, etcetera.

This means that if a supervisor or manager wants to check the frequency of a given complaint, for instance, they can quickly search it. (Without the need for expensive additional NLP software.) So, they get immediate, actionable insight into the current situation.

·         Efficiency

Call listening boasts an inferior efficiency when compared with chat monitoring.

Chat monitoring enables a supervisor to monitor and review all chats simultaneously in one view. So,  they can review chats concurrently and pick up on issues sooner. Compare this to call listening. There, the supervisor must monitor each call one at a time, listening line by line.

This concurrency, then, means that chat monitoring allows supervisors to support and help more agents at once than call listening can.

·         Experience

Both chat monitoring and call listening can take place in real-time. However, the ability for concurrent chat monitoring allows supervisors to rescue negative experiences and better support more agents at once.

This is where call listening gives way to the disruptive call barge. Meanwhile, chat monitoring can give way to smooth chat takeover by supervisors, without disrupting the flow of the conversation.


Chat monitoring vs call listening

Both chat monitoring and call listening are important tools for the contact centre. By overseeing and reviewing customer conversations, you gain access to a treasure trove of information.

For example, you can learn about the happiness of customers, the performance of agents, and issues or achievements of the product, service, and brand. But one monitoring method is more efficient than the other. Yes, phone calls are still a needed part of the contact centre. But when it comes to monitoring, the more conversations you get via live chat, the faster, easier, and more efficient you’ll be. 


Useful links

Calls vs chat: the clash of the real-time titans

The difference between call whispering and live chat whisper messages

The call barge vs the live chat takeover: which makes for a smoother experience?

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