Slashdot Mirror
Live Chat Salespeople On Web Sites
burgburgburg writes "Forbes.com has an interesting article on how one web site is bringing all of the fun of salespeople suddenly appearing and offering to "help" to the web. It seems that Rackspace Managed Hosting tracks you by your IP number when you arrive. After 30 seconds on the site, a Java applet pops up with a photo of a sales person and a live chat offer to assist you in your efforts. According to Rackspace's co-chairman, one-third of users approached via chat engage in conversation with a salesperson, and half of those take the discussion to the next level. Furthermore, according to him, nearly 50% of new customers have originated from the chat feature. They have 6 salespeople watching the site in shifts for 20 hours a day."
I was browsing their site just to check it out and up came the window. I like the concept that you can get in touch with someone right away, but I rather wait until I am ready. No matter what I am buying, I like to gather some information first and then contact the company myself when I have some questions ready regarding their products.
It sucks. Our company tried it for a few weeks and it was just too much of a pain to deal with.
It's much easier to handle support issues through email or over the phone.
I imagine that YMMV considerably, depending on your industry. A year ago I was working for a .com that sold automotive accessories online. We experimented with the same service rackspace has, Groopz. We also tried PHP Chat and LivePerson. Groopz was the best, in our experience, do to the right combination of functionality vs. price.
However, we ended up scrapping the live chat thing all together eventually. We had people who would pop in, ask a random question and then close the chat session. It was very difficult to carry on meaningful conversation that would actually lead to a sale. It's much more difficult for a shopper to do this to a sales guy in person or over the phone because you have their undivided attention.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Just wish Mozilla made it easy to disable flash too.
...
What you need is Flash Click to View
A couple of months ago I was shopping for a new hosting facility for some sites I run. (My florida room was running out of space). I visited RackSpace and got 'chatted-up' by this feature. I was a little shocked at first, thinking this was a automatid response system or something. So I misspelled some words and used bad grammar and the person on the other end responded with real answers to my questions.
The conversation did go to the next level with a voice-to-voice phone call. I ended up doing business with Rackspaces' little sister company, serverbeach and am pleased with the price and the service.
I work for the company that writes the software that Rackspace uses.
.0001 percent of the people we contact get bent out of shape. Most are amazed and want to know more.
We initially wrote the software to use in house to for our sales and support team, but people quickly started to use it and like it.
That being said I am going to answer a few things that I see popping up here.
1. Our sales staff are all technical, network engineers, developers you name it. So when you page someone on our site, you get someone knowledgable about networks, internet, webservers, etc, so they can guid you.
They are many companies that use our tool and similar ones to provide sales and they dont provide quality sales people. So if you have retail store or webstore, you need good sales people.
2. Our products are cross platform. You hear me. Server side Linux, Windows, Xserve, Solaris. Operator side as well. We develop on OSX then port.
3. Support staff are always the hardest people to please with tools, and the more you give them to do the less they like it. I rode a support desk for 5 years and I was a stubborn son of a bitch. However with online support you get the benefit of being able to have 2-6 people in a chat, as opposed to one on one on the phone. It actually makes you work more efficiently. And all communication is logged for QA, and you can email the transcript to your CRM system and the customer. It allows for efficiency.
The biggest gripe I see here on slashdot is that you do not want to be browsing and someone popup. Well here is my opinion on that from a business standpoint and a computer liberal. If I am a business man, and I am paying thousands of dollars for design, hosting, bandwidth, not too mention my products. I want my salespeoople to have every advantage that they can.
IT makes no sense to build a beautiful venue for window shopping only.
Our software has increased companies revenues up to 700 percent, allowing for more jobs, pay raises, in the technical industry.
I personally have to use the software everyday and abouot
As a tech, I think it might be a little intrusive, but then again, if you got your nose pressed against a retail establishment window, someone will come and talk to you. And what is wrong with saying just browsing.
This type of software adds the human element to an otherwise cold web. Which many people on Slashdot tend to lose because most of us sent behind monitors all day and on high horses.
www.groopz.com That is the product Rackspace uses. That is our site.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
First off, Rackspace didn't fund, or start RackShack. Do you know why they changed their name? Legal pressure from Rackspace. Nothing was ever done, but it was suggested strongly that they change their name
Secondly, I know for a fact that RackSpace does care about their customers, so long as the customers aren't pricks. My friend works there, and I have been to their workplace a number of times. They are polite and, in general, more than willing to go out of their way for customers. However, there are people that call up screaming and cursing, and for some reason, they get less support than other more reasonable people.
Third, a small hosting company may be the way to go. Rackspace is not for everyone, and are rather expensive. You can get the same hardware for half the cost at EV1 or similar, but RackSpace is more concerned with keeping people just happy enough to pay the extra cost.
You should probably take my comments with a grain of salt, since I do know the company and a number of people that work there. On the other hand, you might want to believe me more simply because of these facts. Whatever
--If I said something interesting it probably wasn't correct
Having actually used the Rackspace chat I can tell you its a real person or at least a really good AI. I said he scared me and he apologized. I asked questions, he answered. When he wasn't able to help anymore, he scheduled a follow up call. Worked really well. I was really impressed and will probably be hosting 10 or so servers with them and it's partly because of their little applet. I think it's an awsome idea.
No, I had lost my Comcast password (needed to retrieve email), and the support person reset my Comcast password so I could choose another one. The only thing happening on my computer was running the chat Java applet to talk to the support person. To run the applet I first had to make Java and Flash work, which is on my own computer and unrelated to Comcast tech support. I mentioned it because it shows that chat support can have technical issues.
You may want to try the IE View extension. It would save you several clicks (cutting and pasting the URL and also opening IE)
My aunt works as a "live chat operator" for a SF bay hosting company. Her salary is based on how many new clients she gets, so there's a lot of pressure to snag new clients through live chat.
The reason many companies have switched to live chat salespeople (as opposed to phone salespeople) is that instead of having one salesperson with one call, each salesperson can have 5-10 chat windows open at once. Each chat operator has a specialty -- whether virtual hosting, colocation, or dedicated -- so customers interested in a certain plan can be transparently redirected to the proper operator.
Certainly, you'll get your questions answered through live chat, but since you're talking to a salesperson, they want you to purchase a plan. It's how they get paid.
Coming soon: Arthur Miller's "Death of a Live Chat Salesperson"
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I'm a rackspace customer and I've got to say the live chat feature is awesome. I went to rackspace.com once looking into getting an SSL certificate for my server. I chatted with the sales guy for a minute and while he couldnt direct me to a page with more information on the SSL certificates he was able to pull up my account information and give me a phone number to call and an extension to speak with. I did not however purchase the SSL certificate from rackspace as they wanted something like $850/3 years for a 40 bit cert while Instantssl.com was able to provide me with a 128bit cert for 3 years for only $150, albeit without the "fanatical" support that rackspace offers. In my opinion Rackspace has done a tremendous job of supporting our server and while their prices for add-ons like the above mentioned SSL certificate are high the overall support is superb.
The one thing I would like to rant about is the fact that when we signed up for rackspace managed hosting and configured our server we were given the option for AMD or Intel. Being an AMD guy I choose the AMD option. Upon logging into our server for the first time I was unplesantly suprised to find that the processor was infact an AMD duron. This was not apparent when signing up for the service.
I've been seeing advertisements on TechTV for a place called serverbeach.com which offers dedicated hosting for only $99/mo as opposed to rackspace's $400/mo (for our server configuration at least) but since we're happy with rackspace i dont think ill be making a switch any time soon. Has anyone else had any experience with serverbeach? Sounds reasonable for something like a dedicated game server.
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P.S. If I get +5 Informative for this, it's a sign of the coming apocalypse.