[Gaelen]

I posted that I was looking for a live chat system on forrst and got into a discussion about them with another user. He swears they do more damage than good. Anyone else manage them and have an opinion? I'd really like to hear some other points from other users.

[Sogo7]

Well.. you could go over to chess.com and ask for 'kohai' between 0900 and 1700 GMT. She runs twelve mods around the globe and as I write this there are seven thousand in the chat rooms under her ever watchful eye.

[Gaelen]

chat rooms are a different thing all together. These are live support chat on eCommerce sites.

[Sogo7]

lol!

We obviously have a difference of opinion what constitutes E Commerce, remember non tangible goods & services are also saleable items, consider World of Warcraft or chess.com for instance..

Four million plus members, a fair chunk of those are paying for premium features, the rest being exposed to adverts with an average of 10,000 onsite at any one time by the time you factor in page views per visit (and the occasional ad click)it would be a logical assumption that some serious real world coinage is changing hands across a server network that spans the globe with all the problems that entails.

As we all know where money changes hands any form of customer support be it watching over a children in a chat room or providing in depth technical assitance is vitally important to a business, a happy customer will likely be a repeat customer would you not agree?

Julie handles everything from user management* to personal tech support for the users various browser & O/S related issues interacting with the system including android and ipad/phone apps and liases with the programming teams to resolve more obscure bugs and code quirks discovered by inquisative users before all hell breaks loose. If some of these kids put as much effort into their chess as they do trying to find exploits in the system they would be grand masters!

The clients/ members are as you can imagine a fairly diverse group from eight to eighty comprising of geeks & technophobes alike speaking over twelve languages with a few not supported by Google translate so explaining how to clear cookies and cache in tagalog can get a bit awkward.

Add to that the fact that you have all the flavours of the human race to contend with in support tickets, or as I like to describe it .. the entire cast of the Simpsons because you'll get grandpa, ralph ,comic book guy & Flanders to name but a few needing help with something and a stock answer don't always cut it.


Are these not skills that are applicable to any site providing user support for a complex system?

* user management: specialist support for difficult members, troll decapitation, cheat detection, den mother, umpire, friend to thousands and deals with bans, suspensions and termination of paid accounts.

This post has been edited by Sogo7: 18 November 2011 - 01:32 AM

[oakleaves]

I had it on one of my ecommerce sites (I mentioned before how I used Livezilla) The program itself was excellent and it was open source

The snag was you felt obliged to sit at the computer waiting for that one person who wanted to chat and you could guarantee the only time someone contacted you was when you were on a lunch or tea break or loo break!

It was more hassle than it was worth in my case so I got shut of it. But it really depends on how busy the site is or what the site sells and whether you could have someone sitting there as their main job - answering the live chat.

People can always use the contact form and email and the best way in my opinion has always been on the telephone - that really clinches the deal the most.

This post has been edited by oakleaves: 18 November 2011 - 11:29 AM

[Sogo7]

Precisely, the commercial viability of providing live support is strictly a numbers game.

One needs a whole heap of troubled members/ clients and just enough staff to cater for demand without keeping them waiting to long. It's not a service a lone webmaster can realisticly provide, even if you do limit it to daytime office hours sods law states somebody will need support right when your in the middle of something important like running the site.

[Gaelen]

You guys both Have great points... when i think e-commerce I guess i really meant online shopping as that's what i work in.

at this point we average about 5,000 hits per month, but with the new push i expect that to grow fairly quickly and wanted to see if i should incorporate a live chat or not.

still on the fence here, has both good and bad features, i guess the real problem is staffing it.

[Sogo7]

Live support is both the icing on the cake and the last resort for dealing with difficult users.

Polish the FAQ's till they shine, same applies to API documentaion if there's one. Installing a users forum is also a classic way of buffering support tickets with users helping each other. Plus after a while you can normally find somebody worth elevating to 'mod' status who will basically point people toward the faq's or rattle off the answers, along with the general crowd control in exchange for the kudos and the hope of being taken on as paid staff sometime in the future.