Live Chat Support blog

It is a known fact that customer satisfaction is a top priority of any business. After all, no business can survive without customers who will buy their products and services. Other than customer satisfaction, companies would also do everything to gain their customers’ loyalty so that they would continuously buy or use their products and services. However, gaining that customer satisfaction and loyalty is not easy. The world today is composed of abundant supply of products and services everywhere and these consumers will always find alternative choices—better choices here, there, everywhere. Hence, companies nowadays are always looking for ways to have additional selling points to their products and services so that customers would choose their products over their competitors.

Surely there are a lot of things that a company can do to attract customers, but one of the newer trends right now is by establishing good customer open source support facility particularly live web-based customer support. For companies or businesses that are into e-commerce or online retailing, customer support is becoming an important component of the business. Live support is a feature that you can implement in your website that serves not only as a customer sales assistance tool, but also as a sales tool. Through this feature, customers can chat to a sales representative or a customer service operator or assistant to address their inquiries on the spot.

Customer support for e-commerce websites has proven to be an effective sales tool because there are a lot of online shoppers out there who get lost at the point of buying. A lot of customers get discouraged to buy a product in the internet somewhere along the way because they have a lot questions that they want to ask about the product or they want to be assured that what they’re buying could meet their expectations. Through live support, a customer can have his questions answered by a live person with just a click in the computer and in effect guarantee the customer that his purchase will be worth it. On the other hand, it has proven to be an effective customer support as well as because having this feature makes customers feel more secure that if something goes wrong with the product, they can easily talk to someone about the matter.

Several business organizations use web-based live support or contact management software for improving their after services and attract long-term clients. Aside from acquiring proper equipments and systematic processes, web based live support offers new trends in online services. The following are the eight best advantages why your business needs to own a support.

Attentive – if you utilize ‘virtual’ sales workers, you can be sure of 24-hour accomplishment that they are entirely concentrating on providing after services and products for business companies. You can be sure of no politics and office distractions but high productivity.

Versatility – having online support systems ensures you having one person accomplishing all tasks within a day or a group of people participating the entire year. It more accessible to shift schedules from one day to another and return again to the next schedule. It is as versatile as you ought to be.

Measurable – immediate shifts in tasks are no issue when using one on one website support. You can always add employees into a specific task with immediate effects. You can always measure your needs while having the best support systems.

Economical – using online after services provides access to internal budgeting. Hence, you will never have tiresome moments of calculating the actual cost and it will never change.

Absence of Recruitment or Advertising Fees – when you decide to access and employ your own support services team; you would require either advertising or utilizing a recruitment facility. However, all of these things are absent with an online support team. You do not need to think about these things at all.

Minimized Risks – trying to employ directly offers big risks. We all know that business stay away from risks as much as possible. Some tasks may not be as you expected it to be. Your employee may not fit in and the worst case to happen is not to provide anything to your potential long-term clients. Now that all these things have happened, there is a huge difficulty in your hands and you have possibly lost six earning months and large investments. However, if you choose to work with an online support team, you can account for every performance on a monthly basis. Hence, your risk is certainly minimal.

No More Administrations – utilizing online support teams need no administration, as you only require paying for one invoice. Employing in-house workers invite a host of difficulties while doing the task that there seems to be a requirement for thorough observation of departments. On the other hand, online support systems do not entail any problem with this case.

No More Overheads – online after sales are providing the services as you expect it. They cater with good prospects. They are already part of your working team having their own emails without compromising your investments. This only means, you are paying worth the price.

Are you in e-commerce, hosting a website and looking for live support tool? It may be overwhelming at first since there are so many services that offer different kinds of live support tool but if you know what it is you need, then it shouldn’t be so difficult. Here is a short list of live support tools which you can choose from.

Akeni Help Desk Assistant: Akeni Help Desk Assistant is a text messaging system offered by Akeni, a company that specializes on enterprise instant messaging, live help and live support software. This program lets companies to easily host their current web based live help systems. It works by enabling customers to communicate with the help desk staff and sales people through their web browser. There is a built in queue that is automatically distributed to all the available operators. Any IM software or Java/Active-X plug-ins on the customer’s computer is no longer necessary for the program to work.

Answerchat: A live support tool from Alpha Media, AnswerChat is a customer support tool and website chat program that includes the following features: unlimited chat for one monthly fee, text chat with visitors, real time visitor counter box, automatic greeting phrase, customizable chat buttons and window, automatic email form, automatic enable/disable modes and easy tracking of visitors. More features are available under its Standard and Pro package.

Jerry Messenger: Jerry Messenger is a Live Support Chat program with XMPP-based messaging protocol. It can be used for websites which run on your own server. It supports multiple accounts and each account is allowed to have several operators. The server is customizable and is compatible with all web pages. Other features include a message log, a customizable operator loading, online presence management and a multilingual system.

ReadyDesk: ReadyDesk is a complete web-based help desk software that offers features for businesses of any size. It’s a tool that helps you resolve and answers issues with your customers faster through its customer portal and support articles. Through the customer portal, customers can easily send you emails and product inquiries by opening tickets. They can also have live chat with your support staff.

StaffOnline: StaffOnline is a live help and support software with real time audio where you can clearly converse with your website visitors, a real time video where you can interact with your visitors as you would in person, text chat, audio notification, web hosted solution, administrator’s log, keystroke status, offline messages and audio messages on hold.

Provide Support Live Chat Software: Live chat software from Provide Support offers easy integration with your web site, easy management of multiple chats taking place simultaneously, call transfer, operator to operator chats, and proactive chats and chat transcripts, real time visitor monitoring and a native operator console.

Live support on your website is very easy and straightforward. You can do it by uploading the scripts or program executables onto your server, virtual server or shared hosting plans. Another way to go is by availing live support solutions from Application Service Providers (ASP). The confusing part comes down to choosing the right live support for your website.

One of the things you can do when looking for the right live support for your website is downloading evaluation version of different software from websites (specially Live chat bot) like CNET’s download.com, Sourceforge, Tucows and Icewalkers. By doing this, you can try the system and assess whether it’s what you need or not.

Most of the open source projects available now for live help and live support are written using PHP, Perl and Java with MySql backend. PHP and MySql are already installed in the server of most web hosting companies, so using a live support that is based on these solutions is easier. You just have to upload the script to your server and add the live help button to your website. Customization is also unfussy with PHP based solutions; modify it either by hiring a specialist on PHP or simply do it in-house. However, if you are expecting a high volume of visitors to your website after using live support, live help systems using PHP and MySql do not scale well because it requires constant polling of the system to see if there are new messages. The ideal solution for a website with many visitors would be a system written in Java or C++. With this kind of support, you will have a socket connection between the client and the server.