We are going to tinker with Live Chat (via Live Person) on myintervals.com. I have a love / hate relationship with Live Chat to be completely honest. Sometimes I find it extremely helpful and other times I feel like I am talking to a bot that is just wasting my time (“Hi, I’m earth have we met?” – Tommy Boy anyone?).
Here is how it will look:
We have lofty customer service goals with Intervals so we want to see if using Live Chat helps us achieve those goals.
I can see this going very well or becoming a total distraction.
How do you feel about live chat as a customer (for support), potential customer, or the company offering it?
## update ##
Our month long experiment with Live Chat has come to an end. We have decided to remove it from myintervals.com.
Our rationale?
1. the code used for Live Chat was heavy…it slowed down our home page load times from .4 seconds to 2.0 seconds
2. people really don’t like to chat unless they can’t find what they are looking for. If you make the offering straightforward and do good information architecture it makes chat less important…IMHO.
3. as a small business with lots of frenetic weekly activity Live Chat became another thing to pay attention to. Focus is at a premium and the value this adds for the focus it requires wasn’t there for us.
It was a good experiment -Michael