Live chat, do you still provide it?

G

GnomeyNewt

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It seems chat is overrated these days. Mostly what I'm hearing is that chat is harder to solve issues and its better to send technical questions to tickets/e-mails. Using chat only for sales request, what do you guys currently provide over live chat if you provide it at all?
 
I don't know about overrated. The average Joe is likely to find live chat to be of help, and the questions he has to ask are pretty simple. If live chat can give a good % of customers instant answers/solutions, it's still a very effective support method, that will be appreciated especially by those who can't afford long distance calls.

http://blog.hostgator.com/2007/06/22/live-chat-numbers/ gives us some insights into the results of live chat. Sure, things can be better or worse with other companies, and we should not conclude that the live chat satisfaction levels represent the overall customer satisfaction with the company. The comes only after using the tickets system.

A company could of course employ Level 3 techs for live chat. That will reduce the number of "you'll have to submit a ticket" responses, but that's high end service costing top dollar. One gets what he pays for. :)
 
I agree with the above for sales questions the live environment works best but for tech related problems I think email or helpdesk works best. Now if a person just needs to be taught something then live would also be good.
 
Well I think live chat is slowly dying off. Most hosting places, especially the newer or medium sized ones have instant messengers. I know many hosts using ICQ/Aim/Msn/Yim etc.. And these days.. almost everyone has a I.M. I think live chat is a waste of space, it may look professional, but face it guys... these days support is mostly provided via helpdesk and is the best way. Helpdesk gives you features and organization that live chat and IM's can't give you. Only difference is IM/Live chat is realtime and a helpdesk maynot be, depending on the response time.
 
We have both live help and a helpdesk ticketing system, tickets are normally used for support and the live help for sales some people do find it quicker and easier to open a live help than go and email sales.
 
I think live chat is good for sales/billing issues. As for tech, here is a funny story:

A client had a problem with their password and they got onto live chat, which I picked up to help them. I changed the password and they said it didn't work. Okay, so I did it again and tested it this time. Simple cPanel password change. It didn't work again. Okay I try again, it is working, give to customer it is not! I'm not sure at what point, but I asked in the main chat room what the heck is wrong with the server and somebody told me they were having the same problem. Guess what, that guy I was on live chat with and his partner both decided to get help! One from phone and one from live chat. They weren't laughing, so I'm not sure if it was a joke or not!

This happens a lot, not necessarily with just passwords but other issues too. Or they do it to ticket, live chat, and phone all at once, those are the fun ones.
 
Yes I feel live chat is very important, from the day we have started it has shown us positive signs in Sales/billing and support.

Our clients are very much satisfied with the start of live chat support :D.
 
Yes I feel live chat is very important, from the day we have started it has shown us positive signs in Sales/billing and support.
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When did you start it? How positive were the results? 10/20/30% sales increase?

Our clients are very much satisfied with the start of live chat support
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Out of sheer curiosity, are the techs able to solve more difficult issues, or are they level1?
 
Sometimes live chat is good for debugging purposes and you can solve an issue quicker than in a ticket since you can ask the client and he will respond immediately while in a ticket you will need to wait for a while. That waiting may cause client's frustration at times. Overall, live chat support is a good feature.
 
We've never used live support, in stead we just use email so sales@ourdomain bounces to everyone who deals with sales and we just hit replyall when replying and this way everyone has a copy of everything. Makes it very easy for people to see and reply to sales requests if the original replier is away. We use IMAP so we get near instant notifications of email anyway and replying within 10 mins of them sending an email usually impresses, more so than live chat (which from experience on other projects only seems to attract the customers we don't want).

Support is done by tickets so that we have an easy overview of every customer and can view any history of similar problems. Again, as we're notified by IMAP we can usually respond in 1 to 10 minutes depending on work load which suitably impresses the customer (our average time to handle a server reboot including rebooting via a remote reboot strip is 3 minutes).

As you can see we work just fine without live support
 
We do provide 24x7 Live Chat support. I think Live Chat is good for Sales, Billing and sometimes for Level 1 issues which won't take too long to resolve.
 
I never have any such facility in my site. My live chat goes on only in yahoo messenger or MSN messenger. Most of the times it would be because of the innocence of my clients and I teach them each time a new thing. But I get frustrated if the same doubt is asked by all my clients. You need a great patience to handle clients.
 
Purely sales issues. But I am going to offer technical support.

I personally don't like ticket based support. I'd love instant help, hence I will be offering the same shortly.
 
euk-damien said:
We do provide 24x7 Live Chat support. I think Live Chat is good for Sales, Billing and sometimes for Level 1 issues which won't take too long to resolve.
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Exactly. Its good only till Level 1, anything above gets messy :(
 
Yes, we provide 24/7 live chat support.

Depending on that actual issue, quite a few issues can be handled with live chat as its normally a simple setting that is off or needs changed. However more complex issues will have to agree are better suited for helpdesk as some things do take more time to diagnose.

Live chat for sales and billing are a must I believe, its like going into a store and not being able to find anybody around to answer your question same thing applies for online.

Depending on your market, will determine if you offer it and what hours. Might not be suitable for budget hosts as the costs to offer it might exceed profit margins.
 
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