April 4th, 2009 | 
Author: The advent of the Internet in the last millennium has been a major turnaround. It has not only led to the growth and development of many industries and businesses, it has also changed the manner in which existing companies interact with their customers and potential clients. And the transformation continues with things evolving for the better. The chat room or live chat was one such development.
Initially there were some dotcom companies that actually introduced this service and became instant favorites among the masses. The best part about the chat rooms was that your reach was no more restricted to just your local community. It spread throughout the world and gave people a larger audience to address. Given its potential, many large corporations started integrating it into their websites as a means of basic customer service.
The early days of chat rooms were way before the advent of VoIP technologies and hence, they were extremely economical alternatives to running call centers for global customer base. However, with the advent of VoIP and further advancements in telephone technology call centers started gaining ground. Besides, live voice chat was preferred by the customers too. This in same ways affected the popularity of chat rooms in the web portals.
However, many organizations have found ways to revive this technology by giving customers quick and easy access to their customer care agents on their home page or main page. Many others have co-located the chat room links in the FAQ or Help or even Contact pages, so that any customer looking for quick help can access the chat room service easily.
A typical problem with chats was the integration into existing static webpages. However with advancements in the web technologies, these problems have been solved. There are chat room solutions available that can be incorporated into the web browser to allow the customers to start chatting with the customer support agents easily. Besides, some solutions are compatible with other standard chat software allowing the users to use the chat solutions that they are most comfortable with. Lastly, some of these solutions allow the transfer of control or at least let the two parties view the same pages online. This is an excellent solution as the customer service agent can trouble shoot the problem easily and the customer can observe the procedure to handle such problems themselves in future.
Chat rooms can also be used to engage the user into learning more about your products and services. This makes them a good avenue to make effective marketing pitches with higher success rates.
Thus, chat rooms may seem like a thing of past, but they aren’t. They can be an invaluable value add to your website and help you in providing high quality customer care services as well as marketing avenues. Before rejecting this alternative, give it a serious thought – it might just work for you.
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Article Source: Importance of Live Chat Agent for Your Website
