Does on-site customer chat aid sales?

[rharri]

On visiting several sites, I've had a window pop up with a live person asking if they can help me. Frequently they can by directing me to a specific page or answering the question that led me to the site in the first place.

Can anyone comment on their experience using on-line chat? Does using it have an impact on conversions?

rharri

[Hawkgirl]

Some conversation about live chat in a previous thread here - [webmasterworld.com...]

I think it can aid sales, but you have to be careful to have it manned when you say it's going to be manned or you'll have extremely frustrated customers and you'll lose them.

We had a customer support team of 10 and they handled phones and live chat - and the chat did convert sales, for sure. And the cool thing about live chat is that one customer support person can handle about 4 chats at a time, whereas they can only handle one phone call at a time. So it can be an efficient use of resources, too - if your customers will use it.

[rharri]

Hawkgirl,
Thanks. Very useful info.

Manning the chat window would be a challenge for us as we are very small. But some of the software I've seen indicates on the page whether the chat service is available or not so it might be possible to avoid specific hours.

Any privacy issues when the service is hosted offsite?

rharri

[Hawkgirl]

I don't think there would be any privacy issues - we never ran into any and we had chat up and running for well over a year ...

[gibbon]

we can second hawkgirls responses

definetly a good use of resources if you can get customers to use live response rather than phone

[Robino]

Check this out too:

[webmasterworld.com ]

[vmaster]

We've had the live support facility for quite a while. Interestingly, a vast majority of visitors don't use it, but are assured by the presence of a live operator anyway, I presume. Steers away from the image of a "nowhere" site, if you know what I mean.

[rharri]

Thanks for everyone's replys and other links. To summarize, instant Chat may be helpful if its available to users but its a turn-off if I initiate the chat with a visitor.

I see that many chat vendors that host the service on their site retain information about visitors. Is this a potential privacy issue? Along that same vein, can anyone suggest an inexpensive package that I can run from my own server (Linux OS, Apache/Tomcat server software).

Thanks,

[TallTroll]

My particular take on this, is that live chat facilties have 2 areas of usefulness

1) In a technical sales environemnt, where the customer needs some handholding to select the right product for their needs, rather than trawling through hundreds of nearly identical variations on a theme, and hoping they've got the right one.

2) As a passive "customer confidence" tool, ie don't initiate chat sessions, bit wait to be asked, as others have noted. Its similar to carrying a freephone number on the site in some respects, not everyone will use it, but everyone likes to see it there just in case they need it

[Visit Thailand]

I am curious about this but my question is: How do you ensure that your chatters (i.e. those you employ) are qualified enough to answer all the technical details?

I know we would end up with so many technical questions that it would be next to impossible to hire an expert for such a mundane task.

Or do the chatters simply reply to simple questions they can answer and then say we will get back to you on the tougher questions?

I realise if you are in an industry where the questions are obvious this could be easy but when there is hardly no way to generalise questions what do you do?