Chat and Instant Messaging As Business Tools

On the customer service front, imagine a tool that requires excellent typing skills while demanding the same response speed as telephone service, and you have online chat. What's the point? To save on long distance bills? That's the only reason that using chat instead of the telephone can possibly make sense, but with bulk long distance costs now well under three dollars per hour in the U.S. and many other countries, your hourly labor costs had better be awfully low if chat-based customer support is going to produce measurable savings over phone support.

It seems, on the surface, as if capitalizing on the growing popularity of online instant messaging or chat services as a customer contact mechanism makes sense. Perhaps it does, if your objective is to look cool to people especially teenagers who love instant messaging. But in a practical sense, you are probably far better off using a combination of telephone and email responses for sales support and customer service.

Consider:

• Instant messaging demands an instant response. A customer who clicks on a "Chat with a company representative now" link expects to chat with a company representative right now. Leave that customer waiting for more than a minute or two and it is not "instant" messaging or "live" chat. Are you willing to devote enough staff to live chat response to assure message lags of no more than a minute or two at all times?

• A telephone customer service rep must have a clear, easily understood speaking voice. A "live chat" customer service rep must be able to type not only rapidly, but accurately. You will need to screen email reps for spelling and writing ability, and to maintain the "instant" promise implied by "instant messaging." You do not need people who can construct intelligent essays if they are given hours or days to write them, but people who can turn out near-perfect material as quickly as an old-time newspaper reporter working against deadline. Are you sure you can recruit and retain enough people with these skills to make live chat viable? Are you willing to pay enough to attract people who have these skills in addition to the other skills (including endless patience) which a customer service rep must have?

• Most telephone customer service reps read all or part of their responses from scripts shown on a monitor screen. In theory, a live chat operator can paste appropriate sections of those responses into the chat input and send them directly to the customer instead of reading them out loud, and this saves time. But does it? What about your customers? Are they all speed readers? Many people cannot read as fast as they can listen, and in typed chat it is harder for them to ask for clarification of a word or phrase than if they are talking to your rep by phone. This introduces yet more delays.

• Chat is not only dependent on your reps' ability to write clearly, but on customers' ability to form questions clearly and type them coherently enough that your reps can understand them. Again, requests for clarification take time.

"Chat live with a rep right now" is one of those things that looks good on the surface but is hard to implement. Its greatest utility is probably not in customer service, but as a method of generating sales leads. Instead of picking up the phone (or in the case of people who have only one phone line which they use for both voice and computer, logging off before calling), a customer can express interest immediately and, hopefully, get a near-immediate response. Probably the best response is along the lines of, "I'm Brian, your sales rep. Why don't you call me so we can discuss this further? My direct phone number is… ."

Instant messaging is not nearly as suitable as email for sending step-by-step instructions to a customer, and since it is usually easier to paste a prewritten message into an email message blank than an instant messenger form, email is a much more practical medium for technical support. Plus, as stated earlier in this chapter, there is the time factor; customers do not expect you to reply to email nearly as rapidly as they expect you to respond to instant messenger or "live chat" queries, which makes email a lot easier to handle.

Besides, if a customer has a problem which he or she needs to be solved right away, isn't a reassuring human voice on the other end of a phone line a lot nicer than anonymous text in a little box on a computer screen?