Live help - online customer services

Sometimes a website can be a lonely existence and your customers may have many questions about your products and services.

We have been having a discussion about live help on the business forum and thought it would be good to share our views.

What is live help ?

You may have seen some websites with a button that you click and you can talk to someone about the website you are on in a "live" email chat environment.

A lot of companies offer to do this for you but they may not know as much about your products as you do. So how about doing it yourself?

DIY live help

There are two companies we have highlighted that offer free interaction with your own website. boldchat.com and humanclick.com. I'm sure there are others but these do offer a free online live help facility for you.

All you need to do is to sign up to one of these companies, put the button on your sales page (or other part of your site) and as soon as someone clicks on it your are notified and then you can interact with the customer directly. If you have it on all your pages you can actually track where that customer is going on your website.

Is live help for you ?

So far we have see the positives are:

• Interaction directly with your customer
• You may save lost sales by answering questions there and then
• You can add common questions to your FAQ
• You'll find out issues that customers have that you may not have thought about
• These systems are totally free of charge

There are a few issues that you'll need to think about:

• You'll need someone to be available to answer live help systems when you have advertised they are open - it's no use offering the service for customers to find there are no operators available
• Whoever is answering queries needs to have excellent product and company knowledge

If you have a successful live help system let us know. Why not join in the discussion and let others know.

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