I'd appreciate a little advice for a project I'm looking at.

I've never used Live Chat before and am keen to understand what success people have had using it to either:

1.  Enhance the customer service experience for the user/customer, or take pressure off a call centre.
2.  Use Live Chat as a tool to increase conversion

Finally who are the current UK market leaders in this technology?

Any experience that you good people out there have would be most appreciated, however brief a reply.

Thanks

Cyril

hi, Cyril,

'top of the range' is liveperson who have some great functionality. Chris Humphris was my contact there - he's a good guy. Their system can meet both of your requirements, but depends on the level of traffic you've got, your market & your margins whether it would work overall.

Feel free to post more details or get in touch & I'll add more.

Hope that helps,

daniel

Hi Cyril,

There is no doubt that Live Chat solutions can enhance a user's experience in both customer service and sales arenas.

From an acquisition perspective, we have found repeatedly across clients such as Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk that offering as many customer response channels as possible significantly improves conversion rates.  We've run run tests to prove this where we tracked sales through inbound telesales back to specific marketing channel (e.g. we could see where Google pay per click search drove sales into inbound telesales lines).  This drove an approx. 40% uplift in total volume vs. disabling the display of telesales numbers on the site.  There was inevitably a cannibalisation effect but the overall uplift more than offset this (the mix was ultimately more like 50:50 online vs. inbound teleesales).  Adding LivePerson into this mix would obviously add yet another dimension and I'd expect some cannibalisation of both online and telesales figures but an overall uplift.  Sadly I don't have precise figures for that particular configuration.

One word of warning however.  A few years back Carphone Warehouse used LivePerson and had some very serious technical performance problems with it which were causing the entire website to hang.  This may have been some technical incompatibility between their respective technologies but the impact was obviously disastrous - and far outweighed any potentially positive impact.  Andy Harding was Director of Strategic Web Services at CPW at the time - now E-Commerce Director at Ryman - you can find him in the Member Directory here.  He may be able to give you some more detail on what the issue was.

Good luck!

Matt
0777 553 0719

Essence
www.essence.co.uk

Another supplier is TouchCommerce (was called InQ until quite recently).

Good evening Anonymous!!

Well the example you use is a very bad example as this is more about the policies of the company and their call centre staff rather than the live chat software solution.

Their is no difference betweens someone being on hold for live chat and someone being on hold on a phone call, both users will get annoyed and if you as a company want to offer this as a solution then you should make sure you have the staff to manage it.

We have implement live chat for a large number of call centre centric and sme websites with positive results.  Normally you can get a cost saving with live chat compare to standard 'telephones', and offering it as contact option can increase sales as well (or at least customer satisfaction).

Live Chat should not replace a standard phone number but can definetly compliment it as part of your strategy if implemented correctly.

Thanks

Shane

www.punkyduck.com