"End chat" feature for agents

Community Discussion User Experience
1

Make this simple funcionality please.

A moderator has to be able to end the chat. Not only to close it, because this doesn’t do aything on the visitor’s end.

Please notify me when this feature is enabled, until then we will have to use Facebook customer chat plugin :confused:

2

Hi @ChatEnder,

From our experience, it’s best to give your customer control of when the conversation ends. Otherwise, you risk creating a negative experience.

Could you please elaborate on why you think this feature is important?

3

Hello,

Thank you for quick reply.

I understand the importance of customer having control over the chat, but you should also trust your agents not to end the chat before the solution is provided. For this matter, chats usually have rating, so if customer is not satisfied he can express himself. Also he can start a new chat anytime. The only downside of the mentioned feature could be when the platform becomes huge and requires many agents to be online at the same time, and it becomes hard to control the whole support, as you might be suggesting. Otherwise I beleive most admins will make sure to use trutworthed agents, or they will act as one (that’s how we all start I suppose)
Besides that, there is a ban option, so agents might abuse it the same as they could the feature to end the chat. The risk you mention is much more present with user ban, than chat end.

On contrary there are many downsides of not having this feature.
-When the chat is succesfully finished, visitor expects to get a notification about it, which is usually: The chat session has ended, or Paul has ended the chat.
Such notification serves as a confirmation that everything is setteled. Without that, visitor might get a feeling that something is missing. They are also used to be like that, from the other platforms.

  • If the last message is from support, Visitor will have a red notification even when he minimizes the chat, which is disturbing and might cause that visitor leaves the page earlier. They have to end the chat in order to avoid that, and this is not user friendly. Maybe some people don’t even know how to do it.
  • People are lazy and they don’t want to do anything extra, even if it’s just 2 clicks.
  • The user may spam or keep a nonsense conversation after the solution is provided, and the only thing you can do is ban him without any notification which is unconvenient.
  • If the chat keeps on going it requires more valuable time from support, which costs me money. I don’t want to be paying for support that is having a small talk.

I hope you will consider this in the future and at least make the chat end from support side optional. This litterally is the only reason why I swapped to Smartsupp.

Best Regards,
ChatEnder

4

Hi @ChatEnder,

Thanks for the feedback. I understand where you’re coming from. The reason we don’t have the option to force the chat to be ended from the agent-side is not due to a lack of trust in agents, but the best practices in customer experience.

Let me address your points one by one:

  1. You can create Shortcuts for the closing spiel that your team can use. Here’s a collection of Shortcut templates you can import.
  2. The notification would disappear as soon as the visitor has read the last message.
  3. The visitor can minimize the chat by clicking the X button on the bottom of the widget when they are done. No further action required.
  4. If a visitor spams your chat, I would suggest that you indeed ban them. Ending the chat wouldn’t solve the problem, as they can simply start another.
  5. This is a training issue. If you have implemented a conversational flow for your team to follow, closing the chat should be a part of the process. We recommend having agents leave the chat approximately 1 minute after sending the closing spiel if the visitor does not respond.

To add, your agents can close the chat anytime after sending an answer. If the visitor replies, the chat will simply be put in the queue where any one of your team members can take over.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Regards,
Kris

5

Dont bother asking for normal features that every other chat app has is pointless, all they wanna do is add nonsense like AI crap into their product. For example, automatic away has been a request for YEARS and still, till this day… nothing.