Are your customers shy with live support?

[ThinkSupport]

My experence I have worked on an companys live chat support with nearly 200 chats a day and really that helped the company growth by large extent...

Only thing is you got to have every chat taken care properly...

 

[block9hosting]

20-40. Our customers are not exactly shy, nor are the "to be" customers. Its very important to make them feel comfortable so shyness wont be a factor in conversations over the internet or phone. Another key thing is... dont have one person doing live support via phone or internet... you will loose your noodles. Multiple people for support staff is kind of a needed thing!

 

[ThinkSupport]

Correct you need to have correct no. of techs so each chat is handled and helped out that quickly thats what it is for so that simple issue rather than spending time on emails with first autorespond and then looked upon ,its always good to get them sloved right there on chat ... so correct chat techs and there no. also matters..

 

[eglim]

for me, mostly of my customer like phone support, i think its beacuse mostly customer i have locally. Customers from other countries and cities mostly use Ticket system, few use live chat even during office hours we are online.

 

[Bill-zilonhost]

Our live chat system is rarely utilized. I do believe it is because people are shy, bad typers, don't want to be pressured into a sale, feel "live chat" has a bad condatation. I am sure there a lot more reasons. I wish we could ask them, somehow.

 

[ANMMark]

I wish we could ask them, somehow.

Why couldn't you? You're more than free to survey your clients regarding the utilization of your live chat.

Most companies should be doing this about their services or products...it's called consumer research.

 

[PierreB]

We use the well known messenger services, aol, msn, yahoo and ICQ. We get about 5 requests per day. We used to have a live chat software on our first web site but it came to the point of not being used enough to keep it up, so we decided to remove it.

I guess some people are shy or not interested to chat with someone via live chat. I must that tickets system works better.

 

[vito]

A few points to make about live chat.

If you offer it, then make sure you have it "live" most of the day. It's a real negative to offer the service, and display the "offline" image for most of the day. If you're going to offer it, offer it.

A real turn off for me is seeing a popup window inviting me to chat. These windows are usually timed to appear after a set number of seconds after you hit the site. Personally, I find them intrusive and annoying.

You need to make it clear as to the purpose of your live chat. Is it for sales? For support? For both? I can imagine that it would be a real nightmare if you had some server/connectivity issue, and then suddenly dozens ( or hundreds/thousands) of customers hit your live chat to find out what's going on with their site. Logistically, there would be no way for you to handle the queries via live chat.

Vito

 

[Equinox]

Good post Vito. Happy 100 as well!