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."

Comments

technical support?

[wo1verin3]

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?

Hey, it's how they got my company's business

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Polly Want A Cookie

[stuffduff]

Polly want's a cookie that says I didn't come to the internet site to interface with a human. If I wanted that experience I would have gone to the store itself. If I ask for help; having a human around is really nice; but quite frankly I often find pushy sales assistants a bit annoying, as I'm sure others do.

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.

Old, old news

[Animaether]

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 :)

Less useful than sales people in stores.

[CGP314]

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

Re:I tried that once

[dsanfte]

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.

Re:Apparently

[jred]

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.