I recently had an "angsty" conversation with one of our customers whose customer support team being overwhelmed with chats. Lucky for this customer, there are two very easy (and one more advanced) solutions to this issue. And lucky for you, the reader, I'm going to share them here.

If you're considering live chat, or just getting it up and running on your site, this is a common concern: How do I keep from being overwhelmed by customer chats?

After reading our article on integrating live chat and a CRM, you're probably excited to get your CRM hooked up with Olark.

But what if you use a CRM or Help Desk platform that we don't "officially" support? No problem! to make that connection, you'll use a webhook, which happens to be my area of expertise :)

This is an image of a fishing line by Alan Bishop on Unsplash. It's not a webhook, but you get the idea.

Our former co-founder, Zach Steindler, alluded to this briefly in his article on CRM Magazine:

"Even if you're not using a big-name CRM solution, live chat platforms make it easy for developers to add basic push functionality with minimal programming."

Getting frustrated at work happens to everyone, and everyone should prepare their own survival tactics for feeling overwhelmed or frustrated.

When your work is customer support, and your job is to wear a happy face while dealing with angry customers, well it can be challenging to say the least. Heck, sometimes I get overwhelmed and frustrated when I get two chats at once and they're not both asking, "Where is your pricing page?" DO I LOOK LIKE I HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS PEOPLE?

I digress...

Lucy's story is not unique to those of us providing Olark support. We wish we could have helped Lucy get started on the right foot, and saved her some frustration - her bad day on chat could have been avoided had she taken a few small steps! The names and events you're about to read have been changed to protect the Olark innocent.

Nick Oliverio is one of only a few Olarkers who straddles the line between support and sales. He's also held sales positions with other companies before becoming the Chief Support Ninja at Olark.

Nick has a unique perspective on what it takes to be successful at both support and sales. While the two worlds are seemingly unrelated, as Nick explains in this interview, support has made him a better salesperson, and sales has changed his approach to customer support. 

The following is an excerpt from The Cyber Monday Survival Manual.

With more customers comes more typing. And the time you spend typing your holiday hours for the 20th time, could be time spent helping another customer buy something new.

Canned responses help solve that problem.

"When I feel overloaded, I get tunnel vision. It becomes harder and harder to jump between tasks quickly and, more importantly, continue to provide quality service."

In the run-up to the holiday shopping season, we're offering some insight on what things are like when live chat gets really, really busy.

Connecting your live chat software to a simple CRM or helpdesk is essential to sales and service. It makes the information you receive from chats more actionable, and thus more valuable.

A wise philosopher once wondered, "If a conversation happens and no CRM is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Growing your team can make your customers more loyal and increase your sales --- if you do it right.

When you add new people to your team, consider two important factors. You want to quickly get your whole team ready to talk to customers effectively, with a set of best practices to follow. And you want to make sure your system is optimized to take advantage of features that can make your team work better.