The idea of having an online chat solution on your website to answer all the queries of your site visitors is fascinating for all the business as it shows how much you care about your client’s business and it also displays the level of commitment in providing best pre-sales support.
But does it demonstrates the commitment level you want to show? Did you ever consider how much a chat box hurts your business?
I don’t want to be biased in my opinion because I am having a product, which is in a direct competition of these chat boxes or online chats. So let’s first discuss why do you want to have an online chat solution and what are the best use cases:
Benefits of Online Chat
- You can interact with your online visitors in a real time manner.
- You can track their footprints on the website before initiating the chats.
- Customers don’t have to wait on IVR call to get the support.
- Customers can expect an immediate support or resolution for their queries.
- It will reduce your expenses because while only one to one interaction is possible on a phone call, online chat session can have many visitors chatting with a single executive at a time.
You can find more benefits, but these are the few, which draws me towards installing an online chat solution on my website. So, in my opinion, considering all the pros of online chat the best scenario where I would put it is in my support center. Why? Because I want to offer my customers round the clock support through online chat, telephonic or via email. Clients can expect that their queries will be answered no matter what time it is showing on the clock.
But is it viable for you to put a sales resource online 24×7? Maybe for some business, it can make sense and financially viable but not for the majority of business. There is no sense to hire a resource to work for you at night shift where you know the chances are petite of any conversion or even a chat request.
“O.K. so what. I can always put the chat in offline mode and tell the customer that we are not online?”
Does your client think like you do? Whose money they prefer to save… theirs or yours? If they have any query, they will want it solved immediately and won’t like to wait at all.
Also, the first thought of any visitor have in his mind after landing on your website with a chat box is “O.K. let’s chat with them and get the solution of the query”. But if your sales person is not online or if your support guy is going to handle the questions will you be able to give any solution to the visitor’s query? No, you can’t, and this is the loss of business because either they leave your website immediately or leave an offline message. Even if they leave an offline message, they hardly care to get any response from your side.
Why don’t they care about the response from your side later?
Did you ever get the urge to buy a product while window shopping? But if you pass through it, you will realize that it was just an urge, and you did not have any need to buy that product.
Same is the case with the customer’s query. If you are not able to respond immediately, they will hardly care whether you respond to them later or not. So the most important thing is to answer their queries at the same time or let them know somebody is working on their query but do not tell them “Sorry, we are offline. Please leave your message”.
The other problem with online chat tools is that they are expensive. Expensive not only because you have to pay on per user basis, but you will also have to pay for the human resource you put behind them to answer the customer queries.
You can always go for self-hosted open-source tools, but then again you have to pay for the hosting, and if you are hosting your chat tool on the same server as of your website, then you are on a risk of single point of failure. Once your web hosting server is down, then your clients won’t be even able to contact your support through online chat.
If you think I am wrong then, please let me know by leaving a comment below.
