Chat messages / Chat channel
What are Chat messages / Chat channel?
Chat in the contact center refers to web- and text-based conversations in real-time between a customer/website visitor and an agent. Chat may or may not include chatbots (bots) as well as agent-assisted conversations.
Chat is a real-time, text-based channel, usually started from a website or mobile app. A conversation may begin with a chatbot that answers simple questions or gathers details, then move to a human agent when needed. Because chat is text-based, agents can often handle more than one conversation at a time, and the full transcript is available for review.
Customers often prefer chat for quick questions they want answered without a phone call. For the contact center, the key design choices are when to offer chat, how bots and agents share the work, and how many concurrent chats each agent should handle. Common measures include wait time, response time, chat duration, resolution rate and customer satisfaction after the chat.
Related: Proactive chat, Unified digital messaging, AI bots, Agent escalation.