Hello everyone

Do you think that hiring a live chat operator is worth it? how many of you actually use the live chat on any of the sites you visit?

I found some companies offering to man your live support and they charge per chat session, has anyone tried something like that or is it better to just hire some to do the job?

I would always choose a company that offers 24/7 live chat over a company that doesnt. Clientexec have taken there live chat of their homepage and i dont appreciate that.

I aint actually hired someone to man my live chat as i need to keep overheads down, i mainly do it myself, at least that way it costs less and i know my clients are being treated the way i want them.

Once my earnings increase, it will be something i will be looking into.

Regards
Impulse

Clientexec removed their live chat! wonder why, I used it once and its always good to see it available on a site.
I am currently manning the live support my self, a friend helps as well, hopefully I'll be hiring someone soon

Well, it depends. I think you should always first try yourself to give as most as possible support as you can. But i should only hire one if i had a company and it was verry bussy or while i am aways for a long time, and can only give a little support.

I think when you will have a big amount of customers then use the operator. Either make a notice that you will give 24 hours response time. while you have more than 1000 users and having the users undating their clients also then it is better to provide the perfect solution. I saw many multinational marketting company use that. Like : http://www.biznas.com

They have more then 30000 customers in Bangladesh and provide a always up operator to response for any kind of problems. While sending a email with problems will return with answers within 10 minutes.

Shawon

seeing as i use lpanel for billing they have a cheap'ish livechat built in, i simply use that and run it on my own, we dont currently recieve enough users that need support

most things go through the helpdesk etc

I use live chat on sites that I visit quite often. I would much rather use live support than use the phone or wait around for an email. We use Customer Reach on our site and the visitors that use it seem very appreciative. You can also learn a lot about your customers and their needs during a live chat session that can help you design you products/services/site to better suit your customer's needs.

I'm not sure if I would pay another company to man the live chat simply because the person isn't completely vested in your company and customers and the quality of the support might be lower. If you could find a company that would guarantee a certain level of service and perhaps give a summary of each conversation, it might be worthwhile.

Live chat should be introduced for a specific time for the home business companies. Untill you are not on a big proffessional market. As the home business guys can get employees, but not that much. Only for the live chat if he provide employee there, then it is a bit non worthy. But if you are having a big number of customers then live chat may help. But till i belive the times should be specific for the home business companies on live chats.

It really depends on the number of visitor's you get, and how easy/hard is your website to use, as well as the kind of services or products you offer, generally speacking, home business website (offering home business opportunities) would need live help as much as home business website selling products for instance.

Live chat can be very beneficial for large businesses as well. The last company that I consulted for had 30 million registered users all over the globe and live chat was an excellent way to keep the phone costs down. Also, the employees could handle multiple chats at a time as opposed to one phone call.

This particular company's services were all in English, but they were planning on translating the site into multiple languages which is another reason I chose to implement live chat. While the need for service in languages other than English was low, it would be much easier to hire someone on a contract basis to handle those requests through chat from their home part time rather than setting up multiple phone lines.