T 3.6

Widespread use of live chat in e-commerce websites is a fairly new interesting part of today’s electronic businesses. Live support (chat) is a Web service that allows businesses to communicate, or chat, in real time with visitors to their Web site. [1] Live chat basically looks like an obvious chat window on a website where you can only type in a message and hit send.  I see more and more websites displaying live chat boxes as soon as their website loads. Live chat can be considered a Web 2.0 technology since you can communicate with someone else on a website.

Live chat technology is more sophisticated than I thought.  A well-known live chat company coincidently called LiveChat offers a software as a service chat window that can be initiated manually by the operator or automatically by LiveChat system as soon as the visitor meets the predefined criteria (i.e. searched keyword, time on website, encountered error, etc.) [2] Personally I don’t think that live chat windows are annoying as long as the window doesn’t move from the side of a website.

The big question for an electronic business is whether they will lose money by hiring people to operate the live chat.  However, with a live chat you would assume that your business will get fewer phone calls. To me, just seeing a live chat box means that they’re not a small company and I trust them more. In fact, In 2008 Wells Fargo used online chat to gain high customer satisfaction scores and a double-digit increase in converted shoppers. [3] Also, Northridge Developments found that putting a live chat service on their builder website helped increase their conversion rate by a whopping 260%. [4] It seems obvious that a well implemented live chat system would increase sales, and with LIveChat you can try out their service month to month starting at $36 per month. There are also free and open source live chat programs available such as http://mibew.org/.

Almost every live chat study I look up says it improves customer satisfaction and/or sales. A (expensive ) study showed that 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a Web site can offer. [5] In conclusion, it would be very unwise for an e-businesses company not to consider at least testing a live chat solution on their website.

Sources:

1.       http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/L/live_support.html

2.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveChat

3.       http://blog.kissmetrics.com/live-chat/

4.       http://buildertarget.com/blog/home-builder-website-analytics/case-study-home-builder-increases-website-conversion-by-260-with-live-chat/

5.       http://www.forrester.com/Making+Proactive+Chat+Work/fulltext/-/E-RES57054?objectid=RES57054