LRS Benefits?
Savvy Website owners are making use of Live Response systems to increase customer satisfaction and overall online revenues. Live Response Systems gives your web visitors the option to talk to or ‘chat’ with an online CSR (customer sales rep) or CustCare (Customer Care Provider), dramatically increases your website’s usability—from within the browser sesson!
Clients now get immediate and intelligent answers to request for information.
What is a Live Response System?
Put simply, it is a client-server application that resides on three places: one piece that resides on your application server, the other piece resides on the webserver and finally, one piece sits on each of the staff PC that will handle the support.
How Does it work?
You place a piece of code on your web server. It will appear as button with the labels “Live Chat” or words of a similar nature. When clients can not find what they are looking for, or they need assistance, they simply click on the “Live Chat” icon.
This will cause a pop-up chat window to appear where both the visitor and your CustCare, or CSR can attend to, assist and/or close the sales for the visitor.
The CSR now has the tool to convert your webvisitor into a paying client!
Problems for SMEs
One phrase summarizes the problem faced by SMEs(Small and Medium Enterprises) when faced with Live Response Service implementations: Economies of Scale.
They are not big enough to afford the major investments required to plan, deploy and operate such a Live Support system given that their web traffic is not that great. They need the system, but their scale of operations can not justify hiring full time employee to operate the system.
One Possible Solution: Shared Live Customer Support Systems!
Instead of running Live Customer Support Systems fully inhouse, why not consider outsourcing this? The investment will be minimal as these are spread over shared customer support personnel with other SMEs.
Find out more:
Send us an email at marketing[at]futuregen.sg and we will assess your current needs and match you with a correct program.
As an online journalist, I find live chats an interesting tool to get in touch with some experts online. While I’m currently using popular services like YM and Google Chat, this shows the potential of having one for your own website.
Live chats on a website would benefit those that need to get immediate feedback from users. The question here is that is this service real-time?
Well as a user of web services, adding live support/chat on your website provides a quick comforting method for the user to ask for support or inquire for information about your website/service. This entices the user that your support is available quick and easy. This is ideal for companies that are having those time critical issues that they need response ASAP. That’s the benefit, however the company is required to maintain and operate it almost 24hours.
The companies I have implimented this for, have found the opposite to be true. In almost all instances you can provide faster friendlier service that has greater benefit to your customers with a phone call, and the cost of manning a phone vs manning a chat session is actually cheaper because the speed at which you can resolve an issue is faster.
Most “normal” people talk much faster than they type, and are better at conveying their meaning in spoken word when compared with realtime text.
The few cases where Text can be faster are cases where a script can be copy and pasted in to the chat window, allowing a single support person to resolve issues for multiple customer’s simultaneously. But in these cases often an FAQ can take the user farther faster.
In my experience a live chat support, at least the real ones, have impressed. Everyone wants instant gratification. Whenever a company provides instant answers or response to clients’ questions or requests, they raise the bar of customer satisfaction.
Aside from customer satisfaction, it would help potential customers in their buying decisions. I haven’t had much experience on this since I seldom buy anything on the web. However I do believe that a lot of sales are lost because of the lack of a sales rep (in this case via live chat) to handle objections, affirm the benefits, and raise trust/confidence in order to close the sale.
Hope you could share us your presentation via http://www.slideshare.net/
Cheers!
Abel
We tried to implement that in our website, but there seems to be very little impact. Visitors don’t use it.
-Arnold