Each week we feature an app that has caught the attention of the Crozdesk community. We look for exciting features that make our lives easier, apps that take a radical approach to existing problems or a service that has everyone talking about it. In other words, apps that we think you should know about. This week’s featured app is live chat and help desk solution LiveAgent – a sophisticated multi-channel customer service and support solution, designed to connect businesses with their customers.

Crozdesk App of the Week: Help Desk and Live Chat App, LiveAgent
Live chat and help desk app, LiveAgent

LiveAgent Dashboard

Forming the focus of all user activity within LiveAgent, the dashboard can be used to set up live chats; raise, manage and assign tickets and generate reports, as well as configuring department and agent settings. New users are guided through a series of steps designed to ensure they make the most of LiveAgent’s functionality.

Crozdesk App of the Week: Help Desk and Live Chat App, LiveAgent
Raise tickets and set up live chats from the LiveAgent dashboard

Tickets

The first of LiveAgent’s core functions is the tickets feature; tickets keep track of all communication with customers, whether emails; live chats; phone calls; facebook messages; tweets; internal notes or other data related to a single customer. Once created, tickets feature a unique reference number and have five different possible phases: New, Open, Answered, Resolved and Postponed.

Crozdesk App of the Week: Help Desk and Live Chat App, LiveAgent
Tickets within LiveAgent are assigned one of five phases, according to that ticket’s progress

When a new communication is received from a customer, LiveAgent will either open a new ticket for that conversation or, if the conversation is related to an existing ticket, staff members or “agents” can re-assign that conversation to the correct ticket. In the same way, if an agent has a customer’s phone number, Facebook or Twitter details on record, LiveAgent will assign any conversations by phone, Facebook or Twitter to that customer.

Functions for Managing High Ticket Volume

Any organisation dealing with large numbers of customer queries is likely to appreciate the following functions within LiveAgent, designed to deal with high numbers of tickets efficiently. The advantage of these functions is that they also add context to tickets, offering useful data when creating reports:

Transferring Tickets: Using this function, tickets can be transferred to other agents using the “transfer” button at the bottom of the ticket. In order for this function to work correctly, it is first necessary to create departments and then assign agents to these departments via LiveAgent’s configuration settings menu

Crozdesk App of the Week: Help Desk and Live Chat App, LiveAgent
Tickets can be transferred to other agents within LiveAgent

Automatic ticket distribution: By Assigning agents to specific departments, it is also possible to specify which tickets are directed to them. As an example, if it is necessary for agent A and agent B to answer finance related tickets, then agents A and B can be allocated to the finance department within LiveAgent

Rules: Use these to automatically assign tickets to certain departments. For example, a rule can be set up to automatically transfer all tickets containing the word “sales” or “new business” to the sales department

Tags: Can be used to add context to tickets. As an example, if an enquiry comes in from a customer that is obviously ready to purchase a product, a “sales” tag might be assigned to it

Filters: Best illustrated by way of example, a category could be created entitled “Needs response”. A filter could be applied to this category whereby any tickets with a “New”, “Opened” or “Postponed” status would be automatically assigned to it

Crozdesk App of the Week: Help Desk and Live Chat App, LiveAgent
Assigning rules to manage tickets in LiveAgent

Live Chat

The Live Chat feature within LiveAgent enables users to establish chat communication with their customers. Once installed on a website, visitors to that URL will receive an invite to chat via LiveAgent’s chat window. Custom chat invitations can be set up in order to engage customers at a distinct point in their purchase journey. As an example, a LiveAgent chat invite might be directed at customers visiting a checkout page in order to increase purchase confidence and resolve any questions the customer might have at that stage. Other chat functions within LiveAgent include customisable chat buttons and department-specific chat routing, as well as an agent-orientated chat overview, allowing monitoring of the number of engaged agents and customers waiting to chat.

Crozdesk App of the Week: Help Desk and Live Chat App, LiveAgent
LiveAgent’s live chat function enables businesses to connect directly with their customers

Reporting

A useful reporting dashboard is available to help you monitor incoming and outgoing tickets and chats. Among the data visualisations available here is a graph displaying the number of tickets received and answered over time. This graph can be altered to display a range of metrics including Missed Chats, Finished Chats and Average Chat Time.

Crozdesk App of the Week: Help Desk and Live Chat App, LiveAgent
The reporting function within LiveAgent displays key metrics relating to tickets and live chats

Offline support portal

LiveAgent’s offline support portal stores knowledge base articles, forum posts and feedback, providing customer support when agents are offline. Each knowledge base article created comes with a link for sharing with customers or embedding. Features of the portal include a search widget, enabling customers to search within the knowledge base; the ability to attach files to articles and a customer forum feature which transforms each forum post into a ticket.

Crozdesk App of the Week: Help Desk and Live Chat App, LiveAgent
LiveAgent’s support portal feature can be set up to support customers while agents are offline

Languages, Mobile Support and Integrations

Usefully, LiveAgent offers multilingual functionality, currently supporting 39 languages and is compatible with Android and iOS, allowing agents to offer support via their phone. LiveAgent integrates with a range of other apps including Zapier; email marketing apps such as AWebber, GetResponse and Mailchimp; billing management tools such as 2Checkout and Braintree and eCommerce apps including Opencart and Shopify. Zendesk and Freshdesk plugins are available to assist with the migration of tickets from previous helpdesk providers.

Crozdesk App of the Week: Help Desk and Live Chat App, LiveAgent
The tickets, login and department pages in LiveAgent’s iOS app

LiveAgent: Enabling High-Quality Customer Service

LiveAgent is an impressive tool, enabling businesses to engage with their customers by offering live chat and help desk functionality. LiveAgent has been carefully designed to allow businesses to handle large volumes of customer queries in an efficient way. LiveAgent’s ticket functionality is highly customisable, meaning that with a certain amount of forward thinking, even a very small business can set up LiveAgent to automatically distribute and allocate customer tickets. In short, LiveAgent enables a small business to offer the standard of customer service which might be expected from a much larger or better-staffed organisation. This feature makes LiveAgent a valuable tool for small businesses and startups trying to offer high-level customer service on a small budget.

 

Find out more about LiveAgent, visit the LiveAgent Crozdesk provider page.

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