Over the last two weeks, I’ve shared information about How to Chat When Your System is Feeling Under the Weather and Where in the World is Dell Chat? Today, I wanted to share some insight about Chat Support from our customers.
With nearly three years experience in offering Chat support to our customers, we’re still listening to what our customers really like and what they would like improved. Here are some lessons learned:
We often see comments about ‘speed’, and ‘ease’ of Chat support. A click of a Chat icon, enter your service tag and voila’ you’re magically transported to the right support team. We get kudos about the ease of access to chat and about agents being concise and to the point. On the flip-side we lose points with our customers when the agent doesn’t respond quickly. This year, we added an indicator to let our customers see, “the agent is typing” in an effort to make the agent work activity on the other side of the chat interaction more transparent.
It’s common when troubleshooting a system to have the customer power down and re-start the system. If you are chatting on the same system you’re troubleshooting, a system re-start will naturally disconnect your Chat. While we’ve almost always had the capability to resume the Chat session with the same agent after a planned disconnect, the process of getting back to that agent often led to confusion, customer missteps and starting all over with a new agent. In recent months, we’ve greatly simplified what we call the “suspend and resume” process and see a much higher success rate in reuniting the customer with their agent.
In situations of an unplanned disconnect, our customers are clear in their disappointment of having to start over with a new agent or wait to be transferred back to their original agent. We’ll be working closely with our vendor in the coming months to build a reconnect solution for these situations.
We do see comments about the Chat interface needing …a facelift. No surgical procedures required but we’ll be unveiling the Chat makeover at the end of the year! One of the most beloved aspects of chat support is getting the entire transcript delivered via email automatically at the close of the chat interaction. Rest assured, this functionality remains in place.
Other enhancements on the horizon:
- Ability to accept payment as part of the chat interaction – great for Chat customers looking to purchase systems, parts or pay for out of warranty repair services
- We’ll be adding an estimated wait time for times when customers are in queue
- Often times when troubleshooting, an agent will send the customer a link to a page/site to review. We’ve learned that the customer’s click of this link sometimes causes the chat session to end. The new interface is designed to resolve this problem.
We always appreciate your open and honest feedback about chat support. We will continue to work on improvements to make it one of the easiest methods to get support from Dell.