We’re not usually in the business of promoting services or products here - in fact most of us feel more at home when we’re rubbishing them. I think that’s what they call a British thing…

Anyway, I stumbled across something a couple of months ago that I think is quite good and I’m going to share it with you. I don’t know if the concept will ever take off and prove worth the money, but as I said, it’s cool.

Webgreeter.com
It’s called www.webgreeter.com and it’s a service that provides a live chat connection between the website user and an agent. Nothing new there really - web chat and collaborative browsing have been around for a while and as yet haven’t proven to be that popular. Why this is remains to be seen - although I believe that the problem is mainly due to sale reps not being aware of the capability of the systems available (One reason why business development should use the skills of consultants more)

The difference with webgreeter is that rather than wait for the customer to request live chat with an agent, you automatically open the session after the user has been at the site for a pre-determined period. Say one or two minutes. The philosophy behind this is that most users tend to leave the site within a couple of minutes, probably because they couldn’t immediately find the information that they were looking for. The idea is to catch them just as they are about to leave and ensure that they got what they were after.

Pushy?
At first this seems a little forward - but it is something that we already see in the real world. Often when you walk into a shop for a browse you get jumped on by a salesman. Annoying as it seems, this dialogue can convert a sale where a customer was too shy to ask, or where a customer misunderstood the service or product on offer. Furthermore, if handled correctly it can be very good customer service - although the line between customer service and sales is sometimes more grey than an accountants suit.

So the style of greeting is essential - but due to the technology this is easy to control. It’s also easy to capture and assess the conversations at a later date for training purposes.

Chat on the Internet…
…is now widely accepted - especially by people who are quite “shy” in standard society. The fact that it’s slower and more fraught with difficulties such as mis-understanding and identity confusion doesn’t seem to bother most people. I’ve working with many who’d much rather send an email than ask a question face to face or on the phone.

I never click on the chat button on a website - just the same as I rarely ever go and ask an assistant a question in a shop. However if I’m prompted I’m often quite happy for a conversation, and this usually ends up with me getting more useful information that I would have done otherwise, even if I was a little resistant to begin with.

Regardless of if the technology is “pushed” as webgreeter is, or a orthodox “push a button to chat” setup, I think we’ll finally see more of this in the years to come. Hopefully we’ll start to see many true multi-channel contact centres, where agents are automatically fed calls, sms, email, scanned paper or webchat depending on priority and queue time.

Regards,
DB