In a busy support centre it can be difficult to point out who is performing better than the others, who can easily handle eight simultaneous chats and who can provide answers before clients even submit their questions. Either way, making data-driven decisions on staffing, supervisory, and administrative goals requires powerful reporting. ISL Online has added more complex reports to their live chat customer service enabling users to do just that – gather the right information and act on it.

The new pre-built reports are a nice addition to the ISL Online’s live chat support software, ISL Pronto, which lets you respond directly to your online visitors and offer immediate technical assistance with text chatting, quality desktop sharing, and a video conference. While it helps resolve online visitors’ questions, it also promotes staff interaction as a secure enterprise instant messenger. Moreover, ISL Pronto’s reporting capabilities now cover detailed metrics of both visitor-to-operator and operator-to-operator activities, hourly changes, the daily volume of chats, the time spent on each chat, and compares performance between chat agents. Let’s see how.

Overview chat usage
First, log in to your account, open the Reports tab and click on ‘Live Chat’. The live chat report opens in a new window unveiling a detailed overview of what and when something is happening to your online customer service. The graph compares the total volume and the duration of visitor-to-operator (V2O) and operator-to-operator (O2O) chats throughout the selected time period. Meanwhile, the table below provides detailed information on every chat session: its start time, a visitor’s wait time, its duration time, origin (V2O or O2O), status (finished or still on-going), a visitor’s nickname, the operator’s nickname, username and email, and chat poll results.

Create a report
The first thing you will probably want to do is to change the time period. You can also hide specific columns that are not relevant to a certain report and show them again for another. You can personalise reports even further by sorting the chats according to any variables in ascending or descending order by clicking on the variable name once or twice.
• Show the chats through time descending or ascending. Sort them according to session start time.
• Get a better picture of who is busier and taking over more chats. Sort the chats according to the operator’s nickname, username or email.
• See how long your online visitors needed to wait before an operator picked up their chat request. Sort the chats according to wait time.
• See who the absolute winner in marathon chats is. Sort the chats according to chat duration.
• See which chats were external (visitor-to-operator) and which internal (operator-to-operator). Sort them according to chat origin.
• Get a list of chats that are still in progress (initiated). Sort them according to status.
• See which chat visitors had taken the poll. Sort them according to poll results.

Export chat reports
Advanced users, who desire even more graphs and comparisons between operators, different groups like sales and support, days, weeks, or months, can easily export their raw data reports to the table. First, make sure you show all chat sessions for the selected time period. The safest bet is to show the maximum number of chats, that’s 5,000, and then click on the ‘Export to CSV’ button in the right bottom corner. If there are more than 5,000 chats, you will need to export them page by page.

If you use Excel to analyse the data and the data is shown in one column only, here is a tip to view the data in a more organised way. After exporting it, open the file and organise the data by selecting the first column, then open the ‘Data’ tab, click on ‘Texts to Columns’, check ‘Delimited’ and click on ‘Next’, then check on ‘Tab’ and ‘Semicolon’ and click on ‘Finish’.

Hourly reports
The hourly report provides you with the information about when your online support centre is the busiest and when less so, giving you a reason to rethink the number of supporters scheduled to work and when. Together with the information gathered from the Supporters’ reports, you might be able to find a perfect combination of agents who work fast and the ones who can do marathon chats, the ones able to handle more parallel chats and the ones able to handle fewer chats at the same time, and distribute them throughout the day accordingly.

Supporter reports
This report can be used to measure efficiency of support agents, as it lists their average chat duration, wait time and their total number of chats in a selected time period. However, it needs to be remembered that efficiency is a combination of the three indicators, plus, and perhaps the most important one, customer satisfaction. If customers are happy with your live chat service, then you should be, too.

Hopefully you will enjoy the new reports as they may provide you with enough relevant information for better decisions in the future! Talk back and let us know what you think in the comments.