Selecting a business partner is something that usually carries with it a good level of due diligence and careful consideration to ensure that your choice is one that fits your business and your future prospects. In the same way, choosing the right vendor is vital as unlike your usual software applications such as office productivity tools, live chat is customer facing. Making the wrong choice could leave you with disappointed, upset or even angry customers.
As “Increasing your sales” gets touted around by live chat providers are they really promising something or just trying to justify their own software? Well, in our case, we really do know that our customers have increased their sales directly using ActiveReception but it’s not just about the software, it is of course connected with how you use it.
Like any tool, if used incorrectly it can be counter productive…try substituting a screw driver with a knife and you ‘might’ be OK but you run the risk of damage. In the same way, you wouldn’t want to risk damage to your business or your image.
So what do you need to look for when choosing a live chat platform?
On-demand vs. Installed
Across the net you can find solutions that are:
a) Free to download and install on your own servers
b) Paid applications that require desktop installation
Paid applications that are fully on-demand, browser based solutions
The pros and cons of these are quite basic but we’ll give you an overview…
a) Firstly, open source, Free, applications do require a great deal of technical know-how to set up and maintain and whilst this may suit you, you then need to ensure that the cost of the hardware, bandwidth and testing outweigh the savings on getting the software for free as the scalability of such solutions is limited to sites that have fairly low traffic. So, if you’re in the market for a solution that can handle low volumes of traffic and are happy to deal with the technical headaches of managing your own servers and security then this wouldn’t be a bad choice. And, unfortunately, when things go wrong, there is no recourse and little support so we only recommend this for the IT expert small business.
Desktop installs are convenient and typically quite reliable and in essence do not differ too much from on-demand solutions in terms of the chat reliability and scalability but do have the disadvantage of it being another application that requires local maintenance either individually or by a central IT administrator. This can often cause issues when dealing with set-ups or upgrades and may even conflict with firewall settings as it uses a different protocol from browser based, on-demand applications.
Browser based, on-demand solutions are a common form of the live chat software applications in that the nature of the software is real-time, internet connected so there is not really any good reason to not use an on-demand solution. It reduces the possibility of PC software or firewall conflicts and completely eliminates the need for upgrade-installations and set-up procedures which may also reduce your security risks.
Overall, for ease of use, economy and robustness, we recommend a fully on-demand, browser based solution which is why we chose to provide ActiveReception in this way.
So, if On-Demand is the way forward, what should be looked for to separate the best from the rest?
In principle, reliability or uptime is typically the biggest issue here so it’s good to take a look at the hosting platform that the provider is using and checkout their uptime guarantees or assurances. For example, at ActiveReception, we use Rackspace, a world leader in hosting and provide you with a 100% uptime guarantee, which, let’s face it, is nothing less than you should expect.
Beyond this it’s good to take a look at the performance of the different solutions available as there can be great variations in how well the application is built and how scalable it is. If you would like help in learning how to measure the performance of each application then get in touch with us and we will steer you to some third party tools and tests you can try.
Scalability is closely related to the hosting platform, what should I look for here?
At first glance it’s difficult to tell how robust one platform is from the next but it’s good to know that one of the complicating factors in performance is the traffic load on your website. For example, if you own a busy website with more than a 100,000 website visitors per month then it is possible that an on-demand service could slow down considerably. Where live chat vendors claim low costs have a cheap and cheerful approach it’s likely that they’re configured best for small companies with low traffic websites. As with most things in this world, you generally get what you pay for so having a look at a vendors website for testimonials and a client list of known large companies is a good way to determine if they might be able to handle your traffic. In our case, we have a mature system that has been in use for a few years by blue chip companies and would happily allow you a test period to provide you with the peace of mind required for trusting your customer facing image to a third party.
Features, what’s needed?
Of course, the basics of live chat are a must, proactive chat, canned messages, file sharing, chat redirect and real-time page and site monitoring are found on most applications but it’s good to have a deeper look at what the live chat industry is offering.
As with many technologies that are relatively new to the market, features can often be packed into a solution redundantly just for the sake of it, meaning that you end up with a difficult to use solution that doesn’t really fit the bill.
Generally, it’s important to have solid reporting tools, (with custom reports upon request), a highly customisable chat skin, buttons and pre-chat windows etc., so you can fully brand the solution according to your own site design, and a good organisational-user set-up.
As for solutions catering to the larger companies, in our experience, we have found that there are many company specific needs that just aren’t covered by the mainstream live chat vendors so we have an additional suite of functionality that can be activated as required as well as custom develop features for special promotions, needs or call centre structures.
Additionally, it’s also good to look for CRM integration as that’s usually the next step in using the live chat platforms and is something we are very familiar with.
Pricing
What is a good live chat software product likely to cost? Well, as we said above, you get what you pay for in this world but that isn’t to say that you have spend a fortune on getting a good solution that fits your needs. Most mainstream applications that are on-demand use a monthly billing model that is scalable to your needs which is a great value-for-money model. With many solutions costing less than the cliché cup of coffee a day it’s quite an affordable product; for large companies ActiveReception has also gone a stage further to respond to the difficult budget demands of the recession and designed a billing model that is tied to ROI to share the clients’ risk. At the end of the day, the great thing about on-demand models is that you don’t have to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars on a roll-out only to find out later it doesn’t really give you the ROI you had hoped for.
To summarise, selecting a live chat software provider is a process that requires a little due diligence if you are to get something that will really benefit your business and doing your homework will pay off. As with any purchase, matching your needs is a must if you are to be satisfied and ensuring that the product is able to be used in a way that integrates into your existing business is the first step to ensuring that it can actually increase your sales. At ActiveReception we have been on the market long enough and have gathered sufficient experience to be able to implement a live chat solution that meets your exact needs and even monitor your ongoing ROI to ensure you really do see an increase in your sales.
We’re not here to sell you a piece of software but want to provide you with the capability to improve your business, so much so, that we will even share the risk; just ask for more details.