Chat with your Customers?
Instant Messaging and how it is changing customer service
Peter Tracey
June 20th, 2005
A successful business is making money, and that money is coming from customers. One of the greatest considerations confronting successful businesses of all sizes is providing service to those customers.
The Internet has helped a great deal by supplementing the primary support channel of most businesses - the call center - with a medium that is more convenient to customers. Call centers are dreaded for long hold times, disconnects, menu mazes and the inability to multitask. Email solves that by allowing customers to ask questions without having to drop what they are doing.
However, email has its own set of problems. Businesses often get overwhealmed with a high volume of messages, many of them spam, that have to be sifted through. On the other end, when a business sends out an email in reply, chances are that message will get lost amid a sea of bulk email or otherwise sit in an inbox unread. Email turns out to be nearly useless for time-sensitive problems.
Both email and the traditional call center fall short of fully meeting customers' needs. What is needed is a new medium for serving customers - one that takes the advantages of email and real-time phone calls and combines them together.
That new medium is Customer Service Instant Messaging.
For personal communications, Instant Messaging is already set to replace email as the Internet's application of choice. Rather than send emails that may sit in an inbox unread, more and more people are turning to instant messaging for communicating with friends and loved ones.
A survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in fall 2004 found that an impressive 42% of online consumers use instant messaging. That's 53 million people. Of those, 24% use IM more often than email
As instant messaging begins to take a larger role in personal communications, the value of having instant messaging available as a business tool increases. People are not only more comfortable with chat, but will soon expect it of corporate web sites and online stores.
Using free instant messaging networks for internal business use suits most businesses well. Employees choose among themselves which network to use, and use it when appropriate rather than calling a coworker or sending an email. Trying to use free Instant Messaging networks to communicate with customers, however, is a different game. The free networks were simply not meant to be used in this fashion. A user must download and install the software, register with the network, and then add your representative to their list. That alone prevents most businesses from using it for that purpose, and the ones that do are presented with the inability to transfer chats between employees in a cumbersome application.
To effectively offer Instant Messaging Customer Service, you need a solution that was built from the ground up for that purpose. It absolutely must work instantly, with the click of a link. These services are called click-to-chat, and they let your customers have an IM session with a representative of your company right on your web site.
By offering your customers the ability to chat with your staff, you are not only delivering better service; your costs are greatly reduced.
Companies offering these solutions, such as Keyring Labs of Long Beach, California generally host the complete service, so that the service can be enabled by adding a simple piece of HTML (the text that makes up a web page) to your site.
How an organization takes advantage of this service depends largely on how they are currently handling customer service. An organization with a large call center can easily supplement the call center with a small number of agents using the software.
Small businesses with several hundred customers, on the other hand, can have the same group that is responsible for answering phone questions (often in addition to other duties) run the software in the background. The frequency of chat requests will almost never be greater than the frequency of calls, and handling chats doesn't necessarily require undivided attention the way a call does. Also, putting a customer on hold in a chat request is not near as unpleasent of an experience as during a call.
Other mid-sized organizations that already have staff specifically responsible for e-mail inquiries choose to add instant messaging customer service to that role. It all depends on the size of the company, traffic to the site, and needs of the customers.
2005 is going to be the year of the chat. Preparing your company to meet it is in your hands.