QuickBlox chat statistics for businesses: what does it give?

Apart from their primary purpose – providing a communication channel between a customer and a service – live chats can be a bottomless source of useful information for the business. Chats can give valuable insights on how your customer service performs and whether your customers are happy with you. If you know where to look, that is.

Why do you need metrics and statistics? Statistical data gives you the reference point that you use to judge whether you are successful or not. Without hard facts and figures, you cannot know whether you need to optimize and improve. As W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician, once said, “In God we trust, all others must bring data”. This quote hits the bullseye in the context of business performance management – to evaluate if you are doing well, you need to define “well”, and it’s best done with hard figures.

The Quickblox communication solution provides chat statistics for Enterprise customers only. It includes a number of analytical tools yielding various customer-oriented metrics that you can use to optimize your service. Let’s see what you can measure with a QuickBlox chat and how you can interpret these metrics.

Number of users

The number of users is a multi-purpose metric because you can measure it from different perspectives:

• Number of new users. You count new users by the number of newly-created accounts. This knowledge gives you an idea of your business growth. When you overlay the user growth curve over your marketing schedule – special offers, promotion campaigns, industry events, website redesigns, etc. – you can see what brought the desired growth and what needs some rethinking.

Measuring the number of new users can be one of the essential KPIs for eCommerce businesses. Online stores need new customers, thus, for them, this information can be helpful.

• Number of active users. This metric will show you your user engagement. However, before you measure it, you need to define what an “active user” means in the context of your business. It can be a logged-in user or a user who performed one or several of the predefined actions – started a chat, returned to a previous chat, etc. You can measure the number of active users for different periods – a day, a week, a month – to see the trends.

While useful in any online business, this metric can be valuable for healthcare services. Logging the number of active users allows measuring the effectiveness of the service and the level of customer satisfaction.

Number of chat messages

From the number of messages in a chat, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your service. If a case takes too many messages to resolve, it is not a very good sign and needs investigation. The reasons may be different – customers getting to the wrong person who cannot help them properly, a service agent not being experienced enough and asking too many questions, or even a customer being either too finickity or unwilling to supply information.

You cannot do much in the latter case, but if the high message count is caused by your service, you can find ways to improve. You can revise your chat feature so that customers can select the proper department easily. On the other hand, you can pay more attention to staff training to help them resolve issues quickly.

Obviously, this metric is especially useful for customer support services but can also help to evaluate service effectiveness in other areas.

Use of platforms

The QuickBlox chat analytics can show the number of users on each platform – iOS/Mac or Android. Today, you cannot ignore mobile users, and many apps even take the mobile-first approach to reach the maximum audience. Therefore, knowing your platform stats can be useful.

When you see that one of your platform versions is lagging behind, you might need to tweak that app to make it more attractive to the users. On the other hand, you can review your app posting in the App Store or Google Play to make it more appealing to users and encourage them to choose your app among dozens of similar products.

On a final note

We started this post with a quote, and we are going to end it with another – “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. These words are attributed to several famous people and are hotly disputed as of lately, but there is a grain of truth in them.

While statistical data and KPIs are not the primary drivers of business management, their importance should not be underestimated. They are the proof that what you are doing is right or an indicator that you are missing something. A perfect strategy is nothing when it yields poor results, and you cannot know it otherwise than from statistics.

Live chats, as an important component of many customer-facing apps – healthcare, eCommerce, finance – are a great indicator of your service performance. QuickBlox chat includes the algorithms gathering chat stats and converting them into an easily interpretable format so that you can immediately see the history, current status, and trends and can forecast the future periods. If you have any questions about Enterprise plan and chat statistics, contact us and our customer support will gladly assist you.