In the 8x8 Agent Console, chat interactions provide a means of responding in real-time to customer inquiries. Depending on the configuration of your contact center, you can configure the chat access page to help identify the customers before beginning the chat session. You can either allow or require a customer to supply an account number, or other information, before beginning the chat interaction. 8x8 Contact Center uses this information to look up our Local CRM for a matching customer record. When you accept the new chat session, the 8x8 Agent Console opens the matching customer record. If the customer has not supplied any identifying information before beginning the chat, you can use the chat window to ask the customer for the information you need to create a new customer or case record. Here is an overview of 8x8 Contact Center chat today:
- A – In legacy implementation, chat channel was implemented using Support Center functionality. The Support Center contained a link to the chat channel, which in turn could be hosted on your web page.
- C – In 8.1 implementation, you can host your contact center’s chat channel on your web page independent of Support Center. You can design a proactive web chat interface according to your company’s requirements, build a chat script to define a logical workflow for your chat channel, and finally generate a code snippet to be placed in your website.
The chat interactions directed from A or C implementation will then flow through the specified 8x8 Contact Center chat queue and then to the available contact center agents. Agents can process:
- B – A single chat at a time, the traditional way on the 8x8 Agent Console.
- D – Multiple chats concurrently. Agents can process up to six customers chats concurrently if configured by the administrator.
For detailed information regarding Support Center and Single Chat, refer to 8x8 Contact Center 8.0 documentation.
We discuss the following new features in 8.1 release:
- Embedded Chat Design
- Multi Chat
- Customer-to-Agent Chat
- Agent-to-Agent Chat
Case Study
Bob is the 8x8 Configuration Manager administrator at ACME Jets contact center. He wants to create an online chat channel to support website visitors. He anticipates the website traffic to be heavy during peak hours, therefore, the agents should be able to handle multiple chats to meet the demand. He plans to collect some identity information such as customer’s name and account number to identify existing customers so that agents can process interactions efficiently. This information can be collected from the customers even before they are connected to the agents allowing agents to serve them faster and better.
To complete this plan Bob needs to:
- Create a Chat Form to place on the company’s website in order to invite the customers to chat.
- Create a chat script to define the chat workflow.
- Enable ACME Jet agents to process multiple chats with customers and other agents on the same tenant. He knows by default the agents can handle only one chat at a time.
- Train his agents how to use the Multi-Chat.
The following diagram represents configuration tasks Bob must do to get started with this project:
Here is what Bob has in mind for the agents:
To plan his work better, Bob has prepared the following check list:
| Task | Description | How to do? | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|
|
1 |
To create an online chat button to use during the business operational hours. |
N/A |
|
|
2 |
To create an offline chat button to direct visitors during offline hours. |
N/A |
|
|
3 |
To create a chat invitation to proactively invite website visitors to a chat. |
N/A |
|
|
4 |
To create a chat form to gather information from a customer before initiating a chat. |
|
|
|
5 |
An Offline form to send an email message during chat offline hours. |
|
|
|
6 |
A chat window to serve as the interface between the customer and the agent during the chat. |
N/A |
|
|
7 |
To design the chat flow. |
|
|
|
8 |
To enable to agents to have more than one chats. |
Configuring Multi Chat, See 8x8 Configuration Manager Guide for details. |
|
|
9 |
To train his agents how to use Multi-Chat. |
Configuring Multi Chat, See 8x8 Agent Console Guide for details. |
|
See Also
