Nowadays shoppers are becoming more and more Internet savvy, and just putting an 800 number on your website is no longer enough. Thanks to online chat communities such as MSN, Yahoo, and AOL; millions of people are becoming used to communicating via chat. As a result, they now expect to receive live customer support on websites via chat as well.

In this article, Gary Fitzpatrick of ChatAgents.com explains how to implement live customer support on your website, and what features to look for in chat support software.

Changing Times

The Internet has truly revolutionized the way people shop for goods and services. In the past they would reach for the Yellow Pages, or go to the public library to do their research, but times have changed. Today they will search Google, Yahoo and other search engines or online directories; then pore over the search results to gather the pre-purchase information they are looking for. It has become critical for online merchants and service providers to provide quality live customer support on their websites.

There are four basic methods of providing customer support on your website. Let’s examine each of them now: 

Chat Support

The latest darling of the customer support industry, chat support offers a number of advantages over all other methods of customer contact. It is highly cost effective, because chat support operators can handle up to 3 or 4 chats simultaneously, depending on the complexity of the product or service. It is also highly suitable for outsourcing, because accent is not a factor in a typed chat conversation, and highly-skilled English speaking chat operators are available in low cost locations such as India and the Philippines. ChatAgents.com is an example of a provider of low-cost outsourced chat operators. Customers are not even aware that the agent they are chatting with is overseas, an important consideration in the current political environment surrounding outsourcing. 

Chat support software has the capability of tracking visitors by their IP address, and this allows the agent to instantly view the complete chat history of each visitor as soon as they enter your website. You can see what products they have purchased, or what customer support issues they have had in the past. You can also track the movement of visitors throughout your website, and can see the “referrer URL” or website from which the visitor came. In some cases you can even see which search term or pay-per-click ad sent the visitor to your website. That information is very useful in monitoring your marketing campaigns. The chat transcripts themselves are often fully searchable, and are a great source of information for updating your online FAQ’s and knowledge bases.

Most chat support software offers the capability of “pushing” webpages or other content onto the visitor’s screen, and some are even capable of initiating a chat session by popping up a chat request window. While this might seem overly aggressive to some, it is really no different than a brick-and-mortar store clerk approaching a customer and offering help; and many online merchants have increased their sales by as much as 50% by using this technique. Other features of chat support software include the ability to ask for the visitor’s name and email address, and for the visitor to request a copy of the chat transcript by email. It is also possible to let the visitor assign a rating to the operator, and this is a valuable means of assessing and monitoring the quality of your live customer support. 

There are two ways of implementing chat support software: Installing the software on your own server, or paying a monthly fee to use a “hosted” service provider. Hosting yourself is more cost effective in the long run, but only if you have the proper IT staff to maintain it. Privacy issues and data backup concerns are other things to consider before using a hosted solution. New chat support software is being released every day, and new features are constantly being added. Click here for the latest chat support software reviews and user comments.

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