My grandma was the queen of making phone calls to customer service hotlines. From orange juice to cleaning products, my grandma was natorius for phoning toll-free numbers to make comments & suggestions. Why did she take the time out of her busy day to make the calls? Free coupons! Customer service representatives would always take down her mailing address, in an effort to send out a “special treat” for calling in.
If my grandma was with us today, I know that she’d love the “Live Chat” features that you’ll find on many websites these days. If she would have simply clicked a button similar to the one pictured here, she would have been directed to a customer service representative.
At ReadyWire Multimedia Solutions, we started experiementing with Live Chat a few months back. To date, we’ve held roughly 1,500 live chat sessions, which is a phenominal number for our small business. Our goal in 2009: Double that number!
How can we do it? InternetRetailer.com featured in an article about a year ago that contained simple strategies on how to best utilize your Live Chat feature.
When should I invite someone to chat?
Whether you’re using a commercial product like LivePerson or Kayako, or an open source application like Help Center Live, most live chat applications enable you to invite a website visitor to chat. Once the “Request Chat” button is clicked, the a box will appear on top of the visitors, alerting them that an agent is available to assist.
But when is the right time to invite a customer to chat? As a visitor, the chat invitation screen can be quite obnoxious and intrusive, especially when they’re reading and reviewing your website materials.
For more details & tips-and-tricks, check out this informative article, courtesy of InternetRetailer.com.