Online chat software is readily available from a number of very qualified vendors. These packages are usually relatively easy to install on most websites and many are easy to learn and use. But these are just software solutions — those firms do NOT provide you with an operator to monitor your site — it’s up to YOU to provide the live person to answer inquiries.
On the other hand, our solution gives you EVERYTHING you need, including a live operator to patrol your website up to 11 hours per day, 5 days a week. If you were to hire an individual to monitor your online chats, it would likely cost you $2500-$3500/month where our plans start at just $800/month, a fraction of the true cost of doing this internally.
No, it is highly unlikely that the workload of managing chat would be overwhelming; most small businesses don’t draw enough visitors to their sites to create that many chat requests. In fact, we wouldn’t expect that the average small business would draw more than a handful of chat requests each day.
But even though the work is not terribly burdensome, it’s still difficult to add chat to an existing employee’s daily chores. Why? Because most small businesses don’t have an employee that does nothing but sit at their desk 11 hours per day. The key to a successful online chat program is availability. If no one is there when your ideal prospect is on your website and trying to connect with someone, your chat program has not only failed to capture the lead but it may have actually damaged your credibility. Having a meeting in the conference room, going out to lunch, doing a sales call or running a simple errand are typical distractions during the workday — and any one of them could prevent you from being at your desk at a critical moment, and any one of them could prevent you from landing a great prospect.
When we manage your chat, we DO have employees whose top priority is handling online chat and we have systems in place to ensure that your site is being covered by one of our people throughout the day — and it’s seamless for you.
There are two easy ways to tell if one of our operators is online and ready to help. The first is an icon that we anchor to the right side of your web page (if you are viewing this during business hours you will see our astronaut) which ONLY appears if we are online. There are also proactive invitations that will “pop up” only if we are online. When we are running chat on your site you are also more than welcome to “secret shop” and make sure we’re doing our jobs.
Yes, we customize ALL chat graphics to match your site. No astronauts, we promise!
We email a report to you (and whomever else in your organization you ask to be added to the distribution list) a report detailing all of the contact info provided by the lead in addition to the full chat transcript. Click here to view a sample.
No problem, just contact us and we’ll be happy to answer any of your questions and give you a live demonstration!
