Leadership had deployed a live chat software on the website in order to grow the number of net new leads captured from website traffic. To make this initiative successful, they needed to see several outcomes:

• Decrease in response time to chats

• Decrease in unanswered chats

• Increase in captured leads

• Increase in revenue from leads generated through chat

After conducting a needs analysis on the metrics for response time and reading through chat transcriptions, I identified several areas of improvement that could help achieve leadership’s goals including:

• Many chats go unanswered due to sales reps not monitoring the tool.

• The team is very good at answering questions on chat but struggles to capture the lead information to follow up.

• There are gaps in availability on the chat tool when everyone is at lunch or in a group meeting.

Improving these gaps through training was a multi-faceted process that required several steps:

• I conducted Instructor Led Training through best practices on responding to incoming chat messages and how to capture lead information and set up follow up meetings.

• I created physical job aids that included best practices to remember and example chat scripts to follow.

• I shadowed team members as they engaged chat visitors, providing real time coaching to help continue to improve their skills.

After completing this training and sales leadership implementing staggered breaks to maximize coverage we saw improvements in all areas of the goal. Most notably, the training and real time coaching of one sales team member led to them converting a lead from chat, closing the deal, and achieving their bonus accelerators for the first time.