CS Agents Read What You're Typing Before You Hit 'Send' in Chats

If you’ve ever marveled at how instantaneously an agent answered your question on a live chat, here’s the ugly truth: customer service chat agents watch what you type before you hit “Enter.”

Most leading live chat interfaces like the Salesforce Live Agent offer a sneak preview feature designed to help agents anticipate what a customer will ask and pull up information from the knowledge base to ensure an efficient response.

But some customers find it eerie that a message can be read by the recipient before it’s sent, especially grammar Nazis like me who eke out a living agonizing over sentence structures. And sometimes, your first thought isn’t what you actually mean. But the preview feature intercedes in the privilege to “think before you speak,” which some people believe is an invasion of privacy.

Hmm Daily editor Tom Socca was in a chat with a company asking for a product recommendation when the agent responded in literally one second with a link to a product, as the chat timestamp indicated. “When the answer popped up, I felt off balance,” Socca writes. “It was too uncannily quick.”

Me (11/25/2018, 4:17:34 PM): Do you know what sort of [redacted] would work with one of those? We live in an apartment, so the smaller and quieter, the better.

[Agent] (11/25/2018, 4:17:35 PM): a [redacted] will be a good option: [link to product]

Source: HmmDaily

Like Facebook’s data mining and marketers using facial recognition technology to provide personalized product recommendations by reading a customer’s mood, it’s one of those situations where industry insiders have a completely different theory of what’s normal compared to the average layperson.

Research consistently shows that customers demand speed and efficiency above all else, so efforts to make live chat truly instantaneous are logically in keeping with customer centricity – but that’s from the viewpoint of an industry insider. Customers don’t know or care that your snooping is an act of servitude that benefits them in the long run. All they know is the interaction starts to feel artificial.

“Beyond the social awkwardness, it felt as if the agent had jumped in too soon, like an anxious game-show contestant,” Socca writes. To placate both parties, a happy medium might be programming in a two or three second delay to make the chat response appear organic – but companies like Orbitz, which waited two years to tell customers that a hacker had accessed their credit card information – know that deception doesn’t pay.

Customer-centric organizations are committed to empowering live chat agents by optimizing every facet of the workflow experience, so the preview features makes perfect business sense.

“To deliver a chat interaction that is simultaneously personalized and efficient, agents require meaningful context about each customer and issue,” Brian Cantor, principal analyst for CCW Digital writes in a Special Report on Live Chat.

The optimal chat program guides agents with recommended, if not completely automated, comments, answers and follow-up questions. The ability to preview a chat “gives agents insight into what customers are thinking as they type,” writes Ken Gao, founder and CEO of Comm 100, a leading provider of live chat software, thereby serving as an unsolicited source of customer sentiment.

In fact, chat service companies like Ladesk enable the chat operator to “see the current webpage of your customer on chat, and you’ll also be notified of each page they switch to,” according to the website. On the back end, this surveillance capability is euphemistically couched as “visitor behavior analysis,” and is intended to help route the customer to agents with the right subject matter expertise.

Screenshot from Ladesk of its real-time typing view

Proactive chat is predicated on this capability, where an agent automatically reaches out to customers who’ve spent more than five minutes on the checkout page, for instance, or those with more than $100 worth of merchandise in their cart to prevent cart abandonment.

But in this case, even industry insiders are cognizant of the creepy factor. “Chat agents should never reveal the fact that the customer’s online behavior was being monitored,” Gao writes. “Nobody likes to be spied on!”

Businesses have to be tactful about surveilling so that customers know they’re trying to be helpful, not stalkers or pushy salespeople. For example, an agent might assume a customer who’s spent 10 minutes on the checkout page is having second thoughts about their purchase or hit a roadblock in the online payment process, but the agent shouldn’t open with: “Hi, I see from my dashboard that you’ve been inactive at checkout for 10 minutes and 35 seconds. How can I help?”

In other words, never assume customer intent. Instead, offer a friendlier, more general opening like, “Hello, do you need any help with your purchase?” that makes the customer feel noticed, not stalked.