Following on from my article on whether you should use live chat on your website, I’ve now written more about the potential benefits.

The personal touch

The internet is the heart of a revolution in the availability of products and information. However, a website is a far less personal medium than a traditional bricks and mortar businesses.

Live chat is the closest thing to a physical sales assistant being available in a high street shop, offering instant advice and information without the need for the customer to fire off an email or pick up the phone.

Anything that makes it easier for the customer ultimately leads to more sales.

Comprehensive logs

However, live chat isn’t just about simulating a physical experience in a digital space. Being computer based offers its own particular advantages; comprehensive logs and data tracking being chief among them.

Live chat software enables business owners to keep accurate and easily searchable logs of every conversation operators have with visitors. By automatically tagging each conversation with the appropriate operator, it’s easy to track down who said what to who.

Additionally, real time visitor statistics are both an excellent complement to existing web analytics and a useful tool for operators in deciding whether or not to open a dialogue with a visitor (by watching how long a user has been on the site for example).

Remote working

Remote working is becoming ever more common in an online world, and live chat software couldn’t be more suited to it. Having operators in multiple locations simply means giving them access to the software, or with web-based chat software, just a username, password and URL.

Desktop and SMS notifications means that even if operators are engaged in other activities, they will always be aware of when they need to be available for chat.

The use of private multi-operator chat can also re-create the sort of collaboration that naturally occurs in ‘real world’ environments, with the advantage of the discussion being completely invisible to the end user.

Beyond simulation

Having already saved on overheads by not needing a physical space, the ease of implementation and pay-per-session payment models (where you pay for the software based on how many discussions have been held rather than by how many people are using the software) make live chat an extremely cost-effective customer service tool.

In fact, taken with the ease of remote working, invisibility of multi-operator chats and comprehensive data tracking, live chat software is arguably a more efficient solution than any of its ‘real world’ counterparts.

Image Credit: Sarej

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 at 9:31 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.