Over the last few years, the use of live chat as a customer service vehicle on e-commerce sites has been growing, in part because of consumers’ increasing comfort level with online instant messaging. Though they may look and feel the same to the consumer, however, instant messaging and live chat are completely different vehicles, say providers of live chat services and technology.
“You can type in a sentence and get an instant answer. That’s probably about the only similarity. That’s what we try to educate our customers about,” says Tony Pante, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy of CRM services and technology provider LivePerson Inc.
Among the core differences between live text chat and instant messaging is that instant messaging is a system provided and owned by an Internet service provider. “So there is no control over security, user permission, and no ability for an e-commerce site to take the IM information and integrate it with another system they already are using,” says Daniel Sears, director of product management and strategic alliances at CRM technology and services provider Talisma Inc. “Chat is a system you own. You mange the rules, the permission, the users, set up workflow, routing rules, create your own responses, the documents you want to push, and pages you want to provide,” he says.
There are other key differences between the two. “If a business like Callaway Golf, for example, IM-enabled its customers, they’d have to know who at Callaway Golf they were going to interact with,” adds Sears. “That’s how IM works: you create a buddy list.”
Yet another difference is in the ability to track and report on live chat interactions, something not possible for online marketers to do with IM systems they don’t own. “Tracking and reporting around what is happening, the level of security, the encryption: that’s what makes chat a business tool,” says Pante. “IM is a great product, but if I want to get down to the next level of managing it as a channel for customers, that is not IM’s intent. We do leverage it and tell our customers the real-time communication is the same, but that chat applies it to business.”
Pante adds that once consumers have successfully used live chat to interact with a business online, they are very likely to use it again versus other means of contacting customer service. Surveys attached to the completion of a live chat session across sites where LivePerson`s live chat function is deployed generate an 80% positive response rate when asking consumers if they’d use live chat again, he says.
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