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."
Does anyone know how well this would work in a software technical support environment geared for end users or have any experience with this in a support environment?
I remember being a little disconcerted at the applet popping up....
But ten minutes later, I picked up the phone to talk further with a sales rep.
Additionally I wonmder if this might actually violate federal wiretapping law in that they are tracking what I am doing on their site without my permission or informed consent.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
At SplutterFish we designed a custom system based around IRC which allows users to get live support as well.
:)
This means that virtually all of our users can connect, usually without any installation required (through a JAVA applet, or HTML-based webchat on port 80 for those behind firewalls) - whilst still offering our users their own flavor of client to use whenever they want - e.g. mIRC.
Our users are very pleased with the service as they can get instant answers almost around the clock, they can receive transcripts of the conversation on their e-mail address, an FTP server is hooked in so that they can easily upload multiple files or large files, and an IRC back-end shows the details of the upload back to the support people (such as version of software used to author a specific file - in our case: 3ds max scene files).
I would advise almost any company to start something like this, but you do need to have several people watching - either paid or volunteer / honor-system based. As a 'live support' system is only as good as just how 'live' it is.
Oh, and yes, it has been driving sales as well
I had this happen to me on a website where I was already a customer.
It really startled the hell out of me the first time. Anyway, I was at the site because I was looking through their help files to resolve a problem I was having. Once it became clear that I had already given them money and was looking for help, the guy just vanished.
So not only did they interupt me when I was fine on my own, they left me with a bad feeling knowing they are clearly more interested in getting new customers than helping old ones.
-Colin
Actually this is a good thing as long as there is an option to speak with the sales associate. I like the idea of "being able" to ask questions... Now if I start to get bugged every 5 seconds... Well, there are alternate shopping alternatives... ;-)
--Ryan
Of course, the other question is how long before the salespeople are replaced by AI 'bots themselves. But it seems more likely that they will just be outsourced to India.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
How long until we see an artificial salesagent (i.e., not felt as an interpersonal burden) ...that's secretly operated by a real one? (...like the 18th-century chess-playing machine that actually housed a dwarf...)
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
We're a small university and we've recently implemented this on our site for admissions purposes. It's a pretty good system, prospective students are impressed by being able to talk to a live person and ask their random questions. There's good and bad to this though, it takes training our staff to stay online and actually respond, but Groopz has some cool features like being able to "push" a web page to someone, they ask about the soccer team, the counselor pushes a button and our stats from last year popup in the user's browser.
To be honest though, I'm quite frustrated with the server software. We've been using their ASP (App Service Provider) option for a year now but are looking at moving it onto our own server behind our T1. I've found setting up the server to be a pain in the neck. Poor documentation is worse than no documentation I now realize. I admit that it's my first time setting up a Java Servlet but I've got a few years of admistrating a number of PHP apps under my belt and I've been using Linux since 1.2.13 was the latest stable release. Great concept, decent implementation but the product needs some stability and reworking of the documentation/support
I was on the HP web site to look up some info on a printer I'm buying, and there was a "live chat" option. It was initiated by me, rather than by them, but I must say it was a very efficient means of communication, if a litle slow.
I preferred the wait to waiting on the phone.
Kudos for the compliment. I work for the company that designs and sells Groopz. We work hard to make our product solid and feature rich.
And honestly it depends on the product and the salesperson behind the software.
I use Groopz everyday. And I sell an inordinate amount of software with it. Groopz is not our only product nor was it our first one. We developed it for us, and then we decided to try and sell it. It has been a win win for our company and allowed us to easily whether the dot.com bust.
Easy nuumbers are this way. Through Groopz if you contact 20 people a day, that is 100 a week. Say you get 20 leads from it, 5 turn into sales. Those are 20 sales that you wouldnt have gotten from normal venues.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Basically the company ended up being acquired by E.piphany. No idea if anything was ever done with the technology after that (I had moved on by that point).
.technomancer
Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. The salesperson's job is to help you make up your mind by getting into your face with their sales pitch before you have a chance to make an excuse for yourself to say "no".
It's their job to make it difficult for you to say no, and convince you that it's in your best interest to say "yes".
Basic telemarketing. There's a lot of psychology going on here that you wouldn't be aware of if you haven't worked in sales before.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
The Forbes story has a screenshot of an example conversation....
Guest34725: I'm looking for reliable services with minimal downtime. Can you help?
Tony: Absolutely! Zero downtime..guaranteed in our Service Level Agreement
So, either Tony is screwed when the engineers find out, or we can add Rackspace to Cockroaches and Twinkies as the only things that will survive a nuclear war.
Seriously though. This could lead to quite a few problems, given that it's impossible to verify who's taking part in the conversation.
Scenario 1: Sales advisor offers a copy of John Grisham's new book (no, I don't know why either) if the customer buys the two Grisham books he's looking at right now. Customer buys the books but doesn't get his free book. Was it a legal contract?
Sc 2: Female SA asks the customer if he needs any help. Customer asks if she wants to meet up for kinky sex later. SA sues company for sexual harassment (I think 3 /. comments like this have +5 already)
Sc 3:SA offers underage customer a deal on Sex tapes because he was looking at some when his mom wasn't in the room and he doesn't have a credit card to buy the good stuff. Paedophile?
Sc 4: Spammers install logging software which detects this popup, redirects to their website. Suddenly all of Amazon's customers are being offered Barnes and Noble special introductory offers. And Penis enlargment.
Sc 5: Tony (in the Rackspace thing) asks the customer for his telephone number, because, there's no way Guest34725 will give out his mates number. (Pizza for I.C. Wiener)
I'm a Fox whore, I apologise. If it appeases you, I don't watch Fox (channel) if such a thing exists, I live in the UK so I watch BBC or C4 (unless they replace it with snooker, hmm.)
The arguments against pop-ups are somewhat irrelevant because it would be fairly trivial to modify the software to display the chat windows inside the webpage itself.
Some simple session handling would allow you to keep a consistant conversation no matter where they navigated on the site.
I have to agree that this is a great idea. I encountered this feature about a month ago when I went shopping for a new managed hosting plan. The sales staff were informative, Responsive and most importantly, Literate in their topic. I got excellent advice and pricing immediately and feel that this shows a level of commitment that more companies need to persue.
Im sure if dell had sales staff helping customers with their choices (eg, you want to do video editing, you need firewire and a big harddrive, see model XXX, you want to have a robust reliable desktop machine, see raid on model xx) then more customers would be happy to purchase from such a faceless organisation. I know as a small retailer I can beat out a dell quote easily even when I am far more expensive JUST because I can ask more questions and provide a better system quote.
DSLIP Web Design and Content Management Australia.
I've been on the internet for over 10 years, and I recently got my first a/s/l playing Yahoo pool. I found myself in the enviable position of telling a 14yo girl that I wasn't interested, being a 32yo guy, and that she was giving way too much info out to a self-admitted old guy who wasn't interested. I really felt like this chick was *trying* to get some creep stalking/abducting her.
Luckily the only reason I was playing Yahoo pool in the first place was because my 7yo daughter wanted to watch. I was able to use that as an example of what *not* to do to try & stay safe on the net.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
(This article was posted this morning so no one will read my comment but, just on the off chance ...)
I had this pop up about three months ago when I was looking at their sight and the sales guy pops on,
offers to give me some help, answer any questions, etc. and when I asked him a question he promptly said "Oh...I am multi-tasking." 10 minutes later - after I went on surfing somewhere else (tabbed browsing rocks) he shows up again to "assist me"... when I commented that his pop up was a bit intrusive he tried to give me a spiel about how "its no more intrusive than shopping in a mall and having a salesperson come up to you" I called bullshit by saying " Yeah but this is my house and usually salesman don't just pop into my bedroom to ask if they can help AND even if I was at a mall the salesperson sure as hell wouldn't offer help and then immediately withdraw it with some ridiculous claim of handling other customers simultaneously. (like multi-tasking.)
So, as you can imagine, he closed the chat room!
Grrr!
Pissed me rtf off and I made sure all of my clients, associates and co-workers knew about his comments. Needless to say it was not a sale capturing moment for them.