Switching to a professional chat system was a move towards improved service, and LiveChat covered all features the company was looking for in a chat platform.
There was a time when the support team at Innovations for Learning, a nonprofit organization that focuses on teaching kids how to read, was using an in-house chat solution. It was built into their application called TutorMate, which is used for one-on-one online tutoring.
TutorMate is used for a project that connects kids in urban classrooms with volunteer tutors from corporations across the country. The support team was helping the kids’ teachers and tutors with technical issues that kept popping up.
As more and more people joined the project, the custom-made chat became a burden. The chat traffic was slowing down the application process. Tutors and teachers were chatting with the agents in a shared channel, which made managing issues difficult, causing the support team to lose sight of the real problems in the ensuing chaos.
Their frustration lasted until they brought LiveChat on board. They integrated it with their application and organized faster and easier technical support. Randy Burgess, CTO at Innovations for Learning, said:
We needed to break up chat support to one user per channel to have a record of all chats at our fingertips. We wanted to tag and import chats into our own application for further review. And I wanted my agents to work comfortably without stepping on each other's toes.
Randy Burgess, Innovations for Learning
Installing new chat software was a top priority for the organization. They needed an easy-to-use tool for agents that also enabled deep integration with their application. Burgess, responsible for developing TutorMate and bringing tools to the support team, took LiveChat for a spin.
Burgess also mentioned giving LiveChat’s application programming interface (API) a closer look. The API enables building custom integrations. He found the API pretty attractive. The API access gave him all the power he needed to build upon the application and bring LiveChat into their system.
The company’s chat is available in every part of the TutorMate application. Tutors and students can reach out to the support team whenever they have a problem.
Two full-time agents and one backup person work in the TutorMate’s support team. They handle between 80 to 100 chats daily. The support team is available for a chat during office hours, and clients can leave messages using a contact form after hours.
Innovations for Learning also integrated LiveChat with Zendesk and its own system. The integration allows all the necessary information to flow between the three systems. Agents have access to all the required data and can efficiently deal with client issues.
The company adjusted the look and feel of the chat widget to that of its application so that it looks like an integral part of the app.
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When Innovations for Learning settled with the primary usage of LiveChat and the team could easily handle many chats at a time, they were ready to dig deeper into analytics and identify common issues across the TutorMate platform.
The support team started using the tagging feature to categorize chats. It turned out there were a lot of requests that kept popping up time and time again.
When dealing with requests, the team noticed that it would be easier and faster to identify the issue if they had detailed information about the visitor at the beginning of each chat.
Burgess used custom variables to provide that kind of information in LiveChat. A custom variable is a code fragment placed inside an application or website that changes when a specific action is taken, for example logging in to an app. LiveChat can pick that up and display login information during a chat.
When a tutor or student logs in, the system imports their specific ID and shows that information in the chat application. The agents can then respond to the class name assigned to the user ID and react quicker to the problems.
Switching from a custom-made chat system to a professional one was a move towards swift and precise service. LiveChat successfully covered the entire feature set the company was looking for in a chat platform.
LiveChat provides secure and private communication with TutorMate support for each tutor and teacher. Clients like it, and the chat experience is far better than the need to use the phone.
The small support team easily handles many chats at a time and solves technical issues on the spot. The agents like how LiveChat lets them take chats, hand them off to others, see data, and identify the client. The tagging feature and analysis let the agents track the problems that occur and step ahead of them.
With LiveChat, the TutorMate support team can bring quick service, and the kids don’t have to worry about the problems with the application that used to prevent them from meeting with their tutors.
Kuba Rogalski
LiveChatThey ooze inspiration.
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