08.23 | 2005
Is chat software right for your company?
An often overlooked feature for business websites is chat software. By adding chat software to your website
your customers will have the option to talk with one of your representatives in "real-time".
Imagine the benefit of helping customers while they browse your website, offering suggestions, and watching
their movements. That's right, I said watching their movements. A chat operator can actually watch and
track the pages that the customer is surfing. The benefits to this are two-fold; one, you can easily help
your customer as they move through your site, and two, you can better understand the "paths"
that customers take through your website which can help you with ideas for optimizing the customer experience
by making changes to your website layout.
Chat software is a very flexible tool for your company. Licenses for chat software are usually sold on
a "per operator" basis. An operator is the designated person at your company who handles all
chat requests by your website customers. One operator can talk to as many customers simultaneously as they
can handle. Of course, there may come a time (hopefully) when you need more operator licenses to handle
demand. It's easy to add more operators to your license to keep up with customers inquiries.
There are many helpful tools to help you train new operators. For one, you can store an unlimited number
of "canned responses" which makes it easy for new operators to provide the correct answer to
a customer question. Canned responses also speed up answering common questions as your operators don't
need to type the same response every time the question is asked. Another helpful tool is "Live Coaching".
Trainees can be monitored and coached through chats by experienced agents during a chat session. Additionally,
multiple agents can join into a chat with a customer. This is great for bringing a supervisor in to close
your sale or assist in support. You can also transfer chats at the click of a mouse to the properly skilled
representatives. The list of online chat features available to you is quite extensive (live spell checking,
messaging between operators, operator initiated chat, stored chat history, and much more...).
Implementing chat software may not be right for every company but is definitely worth investigating if
it will enhance your customer's web experience, boost sales, and increase your knowledge of customer browsing
patterns on your website.
