Monitoring live chat statistics on WhatsApp, such as response and resolution times, is critical to maintaining high chat service level standards for your company. It’s also a great way to keep track of your WhatsApp customer service reps’ agent performance to ensure they give customers the answers they need.
You’ve got WhatsApp Business (either the free app or the API), your customer service agents are trained and ready to go, and you’re ready to go. However, providing excellent customer service on sales chat platforms such as WhatsApp does not end there.

It also entails monitoring and tracking key WhatsApp live chat stats to ensure that goals and benchmarks are met, standards are maintained, customers are satisfied, and your business grows.

These are the live chat sales metrics you should be tracking whether you’re using the free WhatsApp Business app or the WhatsApp Business API.

We’ll look at these live chat performance metrics and what they mean in this article. Let’s get right to it.

Not all of these metrics can be tracked automatically using the free WhatsApp Business app. The WhatsApp Business Service Provider (BSP) you use will determine how you set these up on the API. More to come on this later.

Live Chat Statistics: Messages Sent, Delivered, Read, Received

One of the most basic metrics to track in live sales chats is the number of messages sent, delivered, read, and received.
These are useful for monitoring agent performance and determining how your customer service agents engage with your customers.

Furthermore, it paints a picture of their overall experience with your company.
Open the free WhatsApp Business app, tap on the three vertical dots in the top right-hand corner, and select Business tools to access these sales to chat statistics.

This should bring you to a screen that displays the total number of messages sent, delivered, read, and received. Here’s an example of how it should appear:

Number of Chats

Another basic sales chat metric is the number of WhatsApp conversations you have with your customers.

This can refer to the total number of chat sessions since you first started using WhatsApp Business or even over a specific time such as a week or a month. The latter is useful if you want to track a sales or marketing campaign linked to your WhatsApp communication with your customers.

You can even track the total number of chats over time to see how frequently customers contact you via WhatsApp.
A few chat sessions could mean that your customers prefer to communicate through another channel.

It could also mean that your WhatsApp accessibility isn’t obvious enough. If this is the case, consider putting WhatsApp chat icons in more prominent locations, such as a floating button on your homepage, or creating Facebook ads that link to WhatsApp.

You can configure your monitoring to detect specific keywords mentioned in your WhatsApp sales chats to go above and beyond. As a result, you will better understand the most common problems your customers are experiencing and will be able to create a FAQ page addressing these issues to reduce problem resolution time.

Live Chat Response Time

Live chat response time is an important metric to monitor for agent performance.
This refers to both first response time and subsequent replies, with the former being especially important because it indicates the availability and reachability of your customer service agents on WhatsApp right away.

This statistic tells you how quickly your customer service representatives respond to messages received through WhatsApp live chats.

The average handle time for first messages is between six and fifteen seconds (yup, seconds, you read that right).
If you’re wondering how to improve chat quality, simply responding will suffice. Customers need to know that there’s an agent beyond the screen reading and responding to their questions.

Tip: If a customer contacts you with a problem that cannot be resolved immediately, a simple message informing them that their message has been received and will be investigated can help to alleviate their concerns. This gives you some breathing room to respond with a more concrete response later.

Average Resolution Time (ART)

One of the most important sales chat metrics to monitor to maintain your chat service level standards on WhatsApp is the average resolution time, also known as ART.

This is the average time it takes your WhatsApp chat agents to resolve a customer’s issue.

Though reducing overall response time is critical, interactions with customers via live chat must also be productive and result-oriented. This entails attempting to resolve their issues as soon as possible.

Here’s a quick formula for calculating ART:
Total resolution time for all chats (or cases) / Total number of tickets resolved.
A low ART indicates effective problem solving, whereas a high ART could be anything from untrained agents and understaffing to receiving more complex issues.

In short, this is a metric you should add to and highlight on your WhatsApp agent performance dashboards because it provides valuable insights into the quality of your customer service and chats on WhatsApp.

Chat to Conversion Rate

The live chat conversion rate is another important agent performance metric to monitor.

This is calculated by dividing the number of customers who converted after speaking with one of your WhatsApp agents by the number of customers who chatted with your agents.

It’s worth noting that the definition of “conversion” varies depending on the context. It can refer to anything and is entirely up to you to define.

Conversions in an eCommerce business usually imply a sale (i.e. when a consumer purchases your product). However, depending on the goal and objective of the campaign, it can also mean add-to-carts, newsletter signups, or even repeat purchases.

You must maintain high chat service level standards to improve your chat conversion rate. This includes training your agents to go above and beyond when using WhatsApp as a customer support channel.

If your resources allow, you can train specific agents for specific tasks. You could, for example, have one team dedicated to upselling, another to encouraging repeat purchases, and so on.

Tracking Sales Chat and Agent Performance Metrics on WhatsApp API

Some of the WhatsApp as mentioned above, sales chat and agent performance metrics are not trackable on the free WhatsApp Business app. (Or, at the very least, not easily, unless you have a statistics and Excel expert on your team who has the time and energy to do this manually on a spreadsheet.)

However, they can be configured via the WhatsApp Business API. These WhatsApp live chat statistics can be easily viewed, monitored, and analyzed on your WhatsApp agent performance dashboard.

Surepass is an official WhatsApp Business Service Provider and can assist you in obtaining access to the WhatsApp Business API. Please get in touch with our team, and we will gladly help you.