Live chat has brought about a lot of positive changes in the world of customer support. It is a tool that makes the job of the customer support team a lot easier and it is a convenient way for your customers to reach you. However, even live chat has its pros and cons, and considering how anyone who visits your site can use it, you need to acknowledge the existence of the so-called “Internet trolls.”
In other words, your agents will very likely communicate with people who are not even interested in becoming a customer; they are just there because they have nothing better to do or harass your live chat agents with comments.
It is quite possible that this kind of behaviour can have a negative impact on your employees, for numerous reasons. As a result, your agents are most likely to get discouraged and demotivated to continue working. In the following article, we are going to examine how to deal with these issues and how to make the job of your live chat agents more bearable.
Reasons to feel discouraged
In case you notice that the productivity or enthusiasm of your live chat agents is dropping, you need to identify the reasons for them feeling that way. People are different, and whereas someone is not bothered with an online offensive comment from a completely random person, other agents might take to heart.
Furthermore, feeling of discouragement does not need to come from the insulting comments themselves; maybe the sheer number of rude users is causing your worker feel disheartened.
Another reason why your employee might be offended is because a rude customer insulted him or her or simply used a random remark not knowing the agent is particularly self-conscious about it. Basically, anything that can bring back bad memories can interfere with the future performance of your worker, and it is not something you as a manager should ignore and tell them to brush off.
There are different ways to handle this, and it would be wise to educate your agents, as well as to prepare them for the possibility of something like this occurring, in order to mitigate the problem.
Teach them the right way to respond
One of the solutions for dealing with these types of situations is to give your agents a walkthrough of what they are going to encounter and how to adequately respond. The main reason why you do this is to eliminate the concerns your agents may face in the future. For example, they might believe that it will become a problem if someone sees them wasting time on a rude customer. Alternatively, they might be afraid that this customer will report about them or share a negative feedback.
So, as a manager, you should acknowledge the existence of troublesome users and tell your employees not to worry if they encounter one of them. Also, there are different techniques on how to navigate through those conversations, and you can even create templates that workers can use in case they notice this behaviour. Basically, they can either ban the user’s IP or divert them to you. Alternatively, if someone threatens your agents, you can also report them to the police.
Based on how frequently this happens, you should consider adding these techniques to the employee training program. Teach your employees how to rise above the situation, handle things professionally and how not to give in to the senseless provocations. After all, learning about the good techniques for overcoming these problems will let your live chat agents handle things appropriately.
Protocols for handling harassment
Lastly, let us go over some tips on how to create a protocol for dealing with a troublesome user, in order to clearly define everything and eliminate potential misgivings your agents might face.
- You should state clearly what constitutes harassment or inappropriate behaviour;
- Tell your agents at which point they should divert the customer to the manager;
- If only female agents are being harassed, tell them to transfer the client immediately to a male agent;
- Lastly, tell them when they are allowed to use templates or other tools for handling harassment, like IP bans, etc.
A great deal of potential customers or paying customers might start to use the Live Chat tool for flirting, giving excessive compliments, and even for sending inappropriate images and proposals. Additionally, contacting the same agent over and over again and insisting on answering personal questions should also be regarded as harassment.
Finally, it is important to mention that this kind of behavior causes job dissatisfaction. You should let your employees know that they are free to talk to the HR department if they feel dissatisfied with their job and what is happening. It may seem like a problem you should ignore, but in reality, you should work on your solutions.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you will find these suggestions useful, and they will help you with addressing these problems. The employee can feel discouraged because they are under pressure to act professionally, and according to their job description, which most likely did not cover this scenario. So, once the employees are fully coached on how to navigate through this conversation, their jobs should be easier and feel more motivated.
Author bio:- Robin is a Technical Support Executive. He is an expert in knowledge management and various Knowledge base tools. Currently, he is a resident knowledge management expert at ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.