When you're dealing with customers (or potential customers) through a website, it makes sense to ensure the live chat experience is a good one or you're going to drive the customers away. It seems a lot of businesses just don't get it. Customer service chat is more than some shiny live chat customer service software.

Obtrusive Chat Help

I was doing some research for another topic last night and the chat popup on more than one site reminded me to write about this. I was investigating dedicated server and virtual private server (VPS) providers because I'm considering a move of all my sites off Media Temple (the service is fine, it's just too expensive for how I use it and how I want to use it).

The problem I had is that I hadn't even had a chance to go from the main page to another page before a chat box popup appeared asking me if I could be helped. This was within 30 seconds of landing on the main page. Of course I clicked to close the box. Why don't you ask me AFTER I've had a chance to look around and not before?

I don't know about you, but a chat request popup like that doesn't turn me on any more than an advertising popup and I'm likely to go somewhere else, which I did more than once while I was searching for information.

Hidden Chat Help

I obviously didn't have a problem with live chat help that I couldn't find. It found me. Not everyone is as "lucky" as I am, I guess, because a lot of people have complained that they couldn't even find customer service chat help on certain websites.

Sprint chat has been notoriously hard to work with for at least a couple of years, according to this thread on a forum: Sprint Customer Service now has ONLINE CHAT!

I've read similar reports about AT&T chat, Verizon chat, and Dell chat, although not nearly as much as what I've read about Sprint.

Answer the Question

I don't want to pick on Comcast because I've never dealt with them, but apparently a lot of people do. You just need to read Twitter Won’t Make You Suck Less. Ask Comcast to get the idea.

It doesn't do any good to answer questions with questions and it doesn't do any good if your answers don't solve problems. Using Twitter to put a band-aid on customer service (and proper live chat) isn't the way to keep customers happy.

I blame most of this on outsourcing to companies not located where the business is actually located, like overseas. You ask a question in proper English and expect an answer to the question. Instead, you get another question or an answer to a question you didn't ask. After a few minutes of doing this, it becomes obvious that English isn't their first language.

I used to avoid calling customer service phone numbers when I was living in the US. If I could even understand the CSR (customer service representative) on the other end, I wasn't quite so sure he or she could understand me. Most of those I dealt with had Indian accents. Every once in a while, I ended up speaking to someone from a call center in the Philippines, which by luck was easy for me since I understand their native language. At least most call centers in the Philippines hire people who have a good grasp on English as a second language.

The Solutions

While the solutions are obvious to me, I doubt people with the ability to make changes (if they end up reading this) will actually do so. For some reason, they're willing to spend a whole lot of money on advertising and very little money on the customer service side of things.

Here are some of my obvious solutions:

• Make live chat easily found on websites but don't initiate it from your end. Let the customer choose it if the customer wants to chat.
• Be selective and hire people who speak the language enough to understand the questions.
• Use live chat software that doesn't suck.

Anyway, you get the picture. Think of the customer side as opposed to the customer service side. Solicit opinions from your customers if need be, but don't wait for something to become an issue before you do something about it.

I could go on and on because there's so much, depending on the company in question, that can be done to improve the customer service experience. In the end, the most important thing is to be able to solve the actual problem.

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