Young consumers driving up use of live chat, expert says
Teenage and young adult consumers are driving a broad move toward live chat as a preferred method of customer service, a trend that will account for up to 50% of revenue at Regina, Sask.-based call center services company 24-7 INtouch within three years, CEO Greg Fettes tells InternetRetailer.com.
“This is where customer service is going for retailers,” he says. “If you look at demographics of who is buying online, kids 18-25 communicate among themselves through chat on their cell phones and instant messages. A lot of times they just text-message one another.”
Fettes says 24-7 INtouch, which partners with Seattle-based InstantService Inc. to provide live chat technology, had no revenue from live chat just eight months ago. Live chat currently accounts for about 8% of 24-7’s overall revenue, but will grow to about half within three years, he says.
Fettes says he expects live chat to grow among the retail industry in stages. The biggest spike will occur among large retailers using basic live chat, which presents a static image of a live-chat button on product pages. Shoppers wanting more information click on the image to engage in a real-time text-messaging session with a customer service agent.
As retailers become more accustomed to basic live chat, they’ll begin to move more into proactive live chat, which lets a retailer program a live chat window to appear on particular pages and at certain points in a shopping session. For example, a retailer might program a proactive live chat window to appear on certain high-margin product pages after a shopper has viewed the page for 60 seconds without making a purchase, Fettes says.
Proactive live chat comes with additional programming costs, starting at about $500 for up to five pages. That is in addition to standard live chat costs that range from about 30 to 70 cents per minute, Fettes says.
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