If you are a one man show do you think that there is any benefit for having live chat on your website? Does it actually make you look worse if you have this and there isn't anyone on the other end for a good number of hours each day? Can it still serve a purpose?

Maybe you could have the live chat button only show up when you're online. The impression it'll make on your customers depends on your target market. I suspect that local customers would not put much weight on 24/7 sales chat, or even 24/7 support.

I've seen a number of companies, some quite big, having a pop-up thingie that invites you to chat with a sales representative after you spend a certain time browsing the site. I think this could be quite effective at clearing up any questions that potential customers might have and take better advantage of impulse buying.

There's certainly a fine line between serving its purpose and giving the perception no one is ever there, if its rarely really "live." As ldcdc said, this really depends on your target audience. I think it's better to have it rather than not.

When I was a one man show back in the day, I had live help, but then I was online 18+ hours a day also. Even today, while I have regular staff that man the live help, I still load up my the live help program any time I'm at a computer.

As Steve mentioned, many companies have the chat PROMPT, and we use it too. If a user is 5 minutes on the site, then we prompt to see if we can answer any questions. I don't like the sites that wait 10 seconds, that annoys me, but if you're 5 minutes on the site, likely you're doing some checking and maybe someone can help make it easier.

Live chat does have it's purpose for certain markets, and is a great tool for upselling and prompting purpose, but if you're going to have a button saying ONLINE, be sure you have the time/resources to actaully be online. Don't just have it say ONLINE, then "no representitve available" - I think that's one of the things that annoy me the most. People pretending to be online, and nobody really there!

I think it would be beneficial as long as you can allocate a certain amount of your time to be available. If you plan on being available the same time everyday you could set your hours for live chat. However, if you are going to be available sporadically then that will probably drive a lot of people away. Let us know what you decide on!

I agree with ldcdc, In the fastly growing cercomstances, customers are looking for 24/7 support. If you have livechat button on your website it makes a slight impression that you are there to help them(Should be online).

Interesting - I was on SingleHop's website today and twice got prompts from Chris, then just now got prompts from Miguel Villegas, then Chris again. I was actually drawn to your site via voting on the best designed or worse designed web hosting sites. Of course, I voted for SingleHop to be the best. LOL. Just curious, are your live chat prompts automatically generated or otherwise- because they popped up pretty quick.

Both should be available. But if you're a one man show, Ticket would be better to start with.

Having no live support is better than having it say 24/7 Live support "Offline"

I do like the idea of having the chat open up only after the user has been there for a certain amount of time. Five minutes is enough to establish actual interest without leaving them long enough with unanswered questions that they become frustrated.

I am online most of the day anyway, but was worried about my down time.

Agreed.

Unless you've got the manpower to man the live chat 24/7, you should try to stick to the ticket helpdesk. And having tickets opened helps track issues too.

Customers won't really like to see your 'Live Chat Offline' message 24/7.

I find when on Live Chat we are less productive then when clients use the ticketing system.

Live Chat is for quick simple queries. If you want support that's what the ticketing system is built for.

Clients tend to be very hasty when it would be far quicker just to submit a ticket and let us work on it immediately.

Yes, I had considered the nuisance issue also. I wonder how many more people are likely to bother you with issues that are more down to their own lack of skills and not your problem, if you had live support-does this become a problem for some companies?

All I can say is that we get new sales from LiveChat, so it's staying.

I think that I am online frequently enough, health permitting to give this a go. At least in school term time-holidays are a different matter as I have to handle everything differently then.