Customer Support Chat Popular But Experience Varies

by lisa ~ September 10, 2009

Sept. 10, 2009 - Small and medium-sized businesses, desperate to deepen connections with their customers, are offering even more ways to communicate with them. The latest is the online chat.

TechCrunch reports today on IMshopping, which allows customers to ask questions directly of small retailers via an embedded chat widget. A Wall Street Journal article calls this phenomenon one of the three best ways to convert web traffic into sales.

eMarketer recently posed the following question: How helpful is live chat? It mentions a study that shows online buyers who used live chat were more likely to make online purchases at least once a week (40%) than buyers who had never chatted (22%).

eMarketer concluded, though, that live chat isn’t appropriate for every situation. Specifically, it “found US online shoppers preferred live help over the phone via click-to-call when dealing with sensitive or complicated information, technical problems or a large amount of money.”

In fact, online tech support is a hot topic today. Although an efficient process for the company, it tends to be extraordinarily time-consuming for customers to explain complicated issues using chatting software. As PCWorld noted recently, “A 24-minute adventure on a hardware customer service chat line probably would have gone faster on the phone.”

Anyone who has reached out to Apple for tech support knows that it can only be obtained via online chat. A seemingly simple problem with my Mac laptop led to a 70-minutes chat session that probably could’ve been wrapped up on a 10-minute phone call. Long delays between my description of the problem and repetitive follow-up questions from the tech support rep indicated that he was chatting with multiple customers simultaneously - and making all of us wait. Frustratingly, the session did not culminate in a resolution; instead, the support rep recommended that I initiate a chat with a different unit of Apple support.

How does this relate to PR? Customer service reps are a company’s first line of interaction with clients. If clients have negative experiences with online chats, such as scripted and unhelpful responses or long wait times, they’ll develop a negative perception of a company. Online chats may save companies money but, unless properly handled, can result in poor PR.

Lisa Tibbitts  is the principal of Tibbitts Creative, a public relations and marketing service that emphasizes corporate communications. She has an extensive background in financial services and an MBA in marketing. Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FinancialPR.

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