# Live chat



## kaniini (Jul 23, 2013)

So, a few questions:

Do you guys think offering live chat on a hosting company site is worth it?  Are the conversions enough to justify paying a few people to man it?

Is there any live chat system that connects to either XMPP or IRC, so that we do not have to use proprietary software just to run the live chat, or is this something else I get to belt out in a weekend?


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## Jade (Jul 23, 2013)

I think offering live chat within a hosting company is an absolute must. Your customers like the feeling of having someone there 24x7 if their facing technical problems.


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## Slownode (Jul 23, 2013)

I think some form of live chat is important, from manned IRC to private chats on the website. It doesn't really matter what, as long as there is something.


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## BlackoutIsHere (Jul 23, 2013)

I think live chat makes sense if it fits your product/price-range. Honestly just having a really good ticket response time might be just as good.


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## Jade (Jul 23, 2013)

BlackoutIsHere said:


> I think live chat makes sense if it fits your product/price-range. Honestly just having a really good ticket response time might be just as good.


That's true, although a potential client would love to see a big green "LIVE CHAT ONLINE" button


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## MannDude (Jul 23, 2013)

Only if you can staff it, then do it. If you or your staff is not online, then have the 'Chat offline' button be a transparent 1px X 1px image or have it not display on your site at all. Nothing looks worse than viewing your site 5 different times on different days and always seeing 'OFFLINE'.

Be warned that Live Chat means most customers will ignore skip opening a ticket and just hit you up via Live Chat.

Customers appreciate good help that can be done over live chat. If you've got to tell them 10 minutes after opening a chat with a staff member to then open a ticket, they're going to be pissed. So make sure those staffing your chat has access to do things.


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## WebSearchingPro (Jul 23, 2013)

I usually use Live Chat as an indicator of their customer service. Sometimes I click it to see if they are offline or online at the time. If they say they are 24/7 and its offline several days in a row at different times, then ... that just makes me sad.

But as MannDude says, you should have it invisible when its "offline" so no one tries to interact with it or realize that no ones there. There is nothing worse than needing help and seeing the offline message. For MannDude's second concern you could have a good notice *BEFORE* starting the chat its for sales/small issues/questions, for issues with their accounts they need to send in a ticket for security purposes and track-ability.


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## kaniini (Jul 23, 2013)

I think I will just add a web chat applet for our already existing IRC channel, which has quite a bit of people enthusiastic about the service.  It seems easier.


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## HalfEatenPie (Jul 23, 2013)

I know BlueVM has their IRC channel as their live chat system.  From my experience I personally would not do that as many people will come complaining and state "I submitted a ticket two days ago" (and later support would come in and say "You just submitted it right now...").  I personally would find it more frustrating than anything really.


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## Jeffrey (Jul 23, 2013)

Live Chat is a MUST!  It doesn't matter what the live chat software is, you always have to be there for your clients.


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## perennate (Jul 23, 2013)

I've never seen a provider where the live chat was remotely useful. Either no one was in the live chat, or the live chat was completely unhelpful (unable to resolve any problems, probably unable to do anything at all so what's the point?). Anyway I don't see a way to make it useful, support tickets work well; but providers who have a live chat that's useless just make it harded for themselves and their clients.

IRC is nice because anyone can communicate with each other.


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## Damian (Jul 24, 2013)

We don't do help over live chat because it makes it extremely difficult to track issues that we're having. How do you guys that do tech support over live chat know when you have the same issue over and over again?


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## BlackoutIsHere (Jul 24, 2013)

perennate said:


> IRC is nice because anyone can communicate with each other.


 Yeah I find it great for getting community tips even before you actually contact the helpdesk.


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## Aldryic C'boas (Jul 24, 2013)

We run a community IRC; most simple questions/problems are resolved by the helpful folks hanging around in there before a client even needs to open a ticket.

As far as on-site live chat.... eh, we've done similar before, and it's _always_ far more headache than it's worth. You'll end up with the one guy absolutely insisting that his "why so lag" caused by a shitty emulator is priority, and tie up far too much of your time while legitimate problems have to wait.


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## serverian (Jul 24, 2013)

Live Sales Chat with a guy who can give you instant quotes: YES

Live Support Chat with a useless guy telling everyone to open ticket: NO


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## MartinD (Jul 24, 2013)

serverian said:


> Live Sales Chat with a guy who can give you instant quotes: YES
> 
> Live Support Chat with a useless guy telling everyone to open ticket: NO


This. Sales and customer service is fine (i.e. questions about products, how do you get XYZ ordered etc). Technical support, no. It doesn't work. Period.


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## Magiobiwan (Jul 24, 2013)

BlueVM has a Community IRC channel which is for UNOFFICIAL support, however staff members do idle/hang out in it. Anything that involves access to their servers or customer info MUST have a ticket for confirmation. I think that a live chat system for a LEB host is impractical. Employees would spend a lot of time waiting for not a lot of money. And, be serious customers. It's a CHEAP SERVER. While we may strive to have insanely fast support response times, it won't happen all the time. We too are humans. We do take vacations, we do need sleep (esp. when we run out of coffee), and we do need to do stuff OTHER than tickets all day long. That's my $2 (calculating for inflation. $0.02 is sort of nothing).


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## BlackoutIsHere (Jul 24, 2013)

Magiobiwan said:


> a lot of time waiting for not a lot of money


 This sucks worse then anything ever D:


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## jcaleb (Jul 24, 2013)

I prefer host have wiki so i can search for answers to my issues. then next preference is good ticket response time in case i cant find answer.


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## shawn_ky (Jul 24, 2013)

Forums, tickets and wikis... Live chat for LE? I don't expect it. I'd rather pay less and wait for ticket response.


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## kaniini (Jul 26, 2013)

Magiobiwan said:


> I think that a live chat system for a LEB host is impractical.


We're not really an LEB host.  Our average conversion is $50-100/month in revenue.


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## tekkiegurl (Jul 27, 2013)

Having a live chat for customer is a  option for customer who have less technical problems. Customer would greatly appreciate if they get quick answer for easy problems they encounter.


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## FireWood (Aug 1, 2013)

Live chat is a must have. It just makes a web hosting company more complete. Without it can still function, but with it its the best.


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## concerto49 (Aug 2, 2013)

In theory it's good but if you put someone good on live chat, it'll be expensive - if you put a lower tiered staff there, it means it's just a deflection service.

A lot of live chats I've gone to ended up like, "Please tell me more about X"

Live Chat: "I'll have a member of the team reach out to you."

Repeat for every other question you need answering.


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## VPSCorey (Aug 2, 2013)

We have had live sales chat for a few months just added support chat too.


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## happel (Aug 2, 2013)

As a customer I couldn't care less about live chat.


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## Reece-DM (Aug 2, 2013)

It would depend on staff and the costs to run 24x7.

I'd expect most LEB host's are not able to spend that little extra due to the very tight profit margins.


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## Damian (Aug 2, 2013)

We had a staff meeting and voted to remove the live chat from our site. Despite being named "SALES chat", people seemed to think it was for live technical support. We do not offer live technical support.


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## SkylarM (Aug 2, 2013)

Damian said:


> We had a staff meeting and voted to remove the live chat from our site. Despite being named "SALES chat", people seemed to think it was for live technical support. We do not offer live technical support.


Yeah that's the downside to live chat. It's nice to have it, but a lot of people use it for technical support when that isn't the intent.


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## ThePrimeHost (Aug 2, 2013)

serverian said:


> Live Sales Chat with a guy who can give you instant quotes: YES
> 
> Live Support Chat with a useless guy telling everyone to open ticket: NO





MartinD said:


> This. Sales and customer service is fine (i.e. questions about products, how do you get XYZ ordered etc). Technical support, no. It doesn't work. Period.


We offer it and it's important that clients be able to get ahold of staff quickly and know someone is there to address their issue. That being said, Technical Support chat is really only good for simple and quick issues (i.e. general q and a's ...firewall blocks on a shared server, etc..). For drawn out or more complex issues, clients really do need to put in a ticket as "live technical chat" is not a viable medium for that kind of support.


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## Jade (Aug 2, 2013)

ThePrimeHost said:


> We offer it and it's important that clients be able to get ahold of staff quickly and know someone is there to address their issue. That being said, Technical Support chat is really only good for simple and quick issues (i.e. general q and a's ...firewall blocks on a shared server, etc..). For drawn out or more complex issues, clients really do need to put in a ticket as "live technical chat" is not a viable medium for that kind of support.


Which is why you really only use live chat for Sales, and technical support for shared hosting, any help needed beyond that, then a ticket would need to be created to assist the client further.


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## ThePrimeHost (Aug 2, 2013)

Jade said:


> Which is why you really only use live chat for Sales, and technical support for shared hosting, any help needed beyond that, then a ticket would need to be created to assist the client further.


In the cases where chat is not sufficent medium and a client requires a ticket we either direct them to our helpdesk or create a ticket for them. I believe there is still a certain satisfaction in knowing their issue is known and being addressed by live "humans".


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## Jade (Aug 2, 2013)

ThePrimeHost said:


> In the cases where chat is not sufficent medium and a client requires a ticket we either direct them to our helpdesk or create a ticket for them. I believe there is still a certain satisfaction in knowing their issue is known and being addressed by live "humans".


Couldn't agree with you more, a client loves to know that their's someone a click away to help them with issues they are facing.


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## Patrick (Aug 3, 2013)

Only good for sales but support is much easier to track and log through tickets. Also always good idea to 'hide' live chat when your offline


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## AlexBarakov (Aug 4, 2013)

As other have said, I find it useful for a hosting provider to have sales over live chat. Support over live chat is frustrating and I personally prefer sending a ticket as a client.


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## drmike (Aug 5, 2013)

Live chat, yes, folks ought to have it especially for pre-sales and issues following the transaction.

Technical issues should get shoe horned into ticketing.


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## MartinD (Aug 5, 2013)

ThePrimeHost said:


> In the cases where chat is not sufficent medium and a client requires a ticket we either direct them to our helpdesk or create a ticket for them. I believe there is still a certain satisfaction in knowing their issue is known and being addressed by live "humans".


They should have that satisfaction regardless of the method used to contact you. If they don't then perhaps the problem lies with the ticketing side of an operation rather than anything else.


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## Magiobiwan (Aug 6, 2013)

Tickets can be a somewhat hard way to handle things like sales and some tech support issues. IRC is a nice way to do it.


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## jmaben (Dec 5, 2013)

Live chat has the ability to provide the convenient answers that customers want, while also adding significant benefits to the staff and bottom line of companies.

*These are some basic benefits of live chat:*


Convert more visitors into customers
Grow Sales and Improved Corporate Branding
Improve customer loyalty and satisfaction
Reduce customer support costs
Faster product enhancements
Improve support team's efficiency
Proactive Sales 
Helps improving marketing efforts
Resolves website visitors’ queries in real-time
Live Chat Helps Optimize Your Website
Expand communication channel
I am using Live2Support live chat since 2010 which is helping in my business growth.


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## rsk (Dec 5, 2013)

To be completely honest with you, we used to run live chat, now we are removing it when we redesign the site by new year.

Why? because an interactive knowledge-base (that is well written) is far more better than to sit in a p2p chat for 1 hour just to accomplish what a 2-5minutes knowledge-base article would convey.


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## cloudlix (Dec 19, 2013)

We have been installed livechat for sales, and it works bery good. Sales grows. We have and livechat for support, and i can say that is helps, and our custommers are happy for that.


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## cubixcloud (Dec 19, 2013)

Live chat is just something else to manage and account for fiscally. If you think you'll capture more customers with live chat then go for it. If not, folks shouldn't decide on a company because they have live chat or not, it should be other attributes. But oh how the hosting industry as changed from when I first started.

If you are quick about answering tickets then who cares about live chat IMO. You want to diversify your communication mediums but not to the point to where you cannot keep up. Our website and ticketing system are on two separate servers. So, if the site is down customers can still open tickets from the panel or email. Our larger customers simply have another way to reach us should they need.


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## SrsX (Dec 19, 2013)

kaniini said:


> So, a few questions:
> 
> Do you guys think offering live chat on a hosting company site is worth it?  Are the conversions enough to justify paying a few people to man it?
> 
> Is there any live chat system that connects to either XMPP or IRC, so that we do not have to use proprietary software just to run the live chat, or is this something else I get to belt out in a weekend?


XMPP connection sounds like a nice weekend project. I'll give it a shot, see what I can come up with.


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## DamienSB (Dec 19, 2013)

Damian said:


> We don't do help over live chat because it makes it extremely difficult to track issues that we're having. How do you guys that do tech support over live chat know when you have the same issue over and over again?


If we handle anything over live chat we open a support ticket under their account and tag it with key words of their problem. We can have our software link chat logs with tickets/client accounts so it is somewhat easy to track. Sometimes we will note their ticket or account with more information as well.


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## Sefket (Dec 21, 2013)

Jade said:


> I think offering live chat within a hosting company is an absolute must. Your customers like the feeling of having someone there 24x7 if their facing technical problems.


I have to agree with Jade. Live chat makes customers feel comfortable knowing that there are staff online at all times _especially _if something goes wrong with your website (of course it depends on how bad the issue is as a ticket may be needed instead as the issue may have to be investigated). Customers panic when something happens to their website and don't have the patience to create a ticket.. Of course they can call in too but some companies don't use a phone or am I incorrect here?

Sales/Billing is also great on live chat if you have billing issues or have pre-sales questions.


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