In our previous article we talked about how we and some of customers use ScreenSteps Live to scale our support services through online chat. In this post I wanted to give you a few tips on getting started with online support chat. Following these tips have made offering chat support to a customers a benefit instead of a burden to our business.

Getting Started

1. Prepare your documentation

If you have your help resources set up correctly then you don’t need to be intimidated about getting started with online chat. Just make sure you have a list of urls that point to common questions your customers have. Have this list handy so that you can easily paste the urls into your support chats. If you are using ScreenSteps Live for your documentation then be sure to set up all of your support agents with the ScreenSteps Live Support Client. The Support Client will save your agents hours of time when responding to support chats.

2. Don’t worry about always having it on

You don’t need to feel like you always need to have the chat service on. If things get too busy or you need to step out it’s not a big deal. All the chat services we have seen will let the user leave a message that will get emailed to you. Chat is a tool to help your customers and help your business. Don’t become a slave to it. Also, be aware that many chat services will let you limit the maximum number of simultaneous chats an agent can run. If all agents are busy then new chat requests will just go to your dropbox where they can leave a message.

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For quite awhile now we have offered online chat from our website. A lot of our customers have asked us about our experience with offering chat support. They ask because they are concerened about adding chat to their website. They are worried about how much time it will take and whether or not they will get inundated with chat requests. In this post I’ll tell you about our experience with online chat as well as how we and some of our customers use ScreenSteps Live to improve the chat experience for our customers and support agents.

Is online chat worth it?

Yes! We added chat to our site over a year ago and it has definitely been worth it. I would say that over half of the chat requests we receive are actually pre-sales questions. Often someone just has a question about a feature, an integration or product licensing. By being able to answer their question instantly we have been able to close many sales that would have otherwise been delayed or abandoned. I have spoken with several other users of chat services and they report similar experiences. So, from a strictly monetary standpoint, chat makes a lot of sense.

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