Your Source for Providing a Better Customer Service and Customer Support Experience

Determining the 'chatters' on your support team

If you use chat as a support channel, should everyone on the customer support team engage in chats with customers, or just a designated set of agents? That was one of the questions raised at last month’s ParaFest, with varying opinions. While there’s little doubt that live chat can add both an additional level of service and credibility to the overall customer experience, is it best handled by a designated set of agents most skilled in live online conversation? Should it be used for both sales and service? Forrester’s most recent research indicates that live chat is the most preferred communications method when a visitor is having trouble finding an item or experiencing an error on your Web site, for example. Tammy Woodruff from Coremetrics says their specialized best practice team handles chat exclusively. What about your organization? How do you make the call?

What can chat do for an organization?

Today’s tech-savvy, IM generation of consumers requires multi-channel support offerings and increasingly their preferred support channel is live chat. But other than ensuring that customers receive an immediate response to their inquiry what can chat do for an organization?

Organizations can leverage chat in both sales and support to increase customer satisfaction and generate revenue. Chat can enable support teams to deliver service and support where and when customers need it – whether it be in-game, in-application, a Web form, a shopping cart, or as an escalation channel for self-service – as well as providing an opportunity to generate sales leads, increase Web sales conversion rates and increase revenue by proactively inviting prospects or customers to chat with available sales or support representatives. Read more »

Parature Chat - CSR view

Parature Chat™ is empowering organizations across diverse industries to proactively initiate conversations with customers and prospects. Parature customers can leverage chat in both sales and support environments to increase customer satisfaction and generate revenue. Chat enables support teams to deliver service and support where and when customers need it – whether it be in-game, in-application, a Web form, a shopping cart, or as an escalation channel for self-service – as well as providing an opportunity to generate sales leads, increase Web sales conversion rates and increase revenue by proactively inviting prospects or customers to chat with available sales or support representatives. Read more »

Young gaming customers are a special group, and their customer support needs are in a class by themselves.

Perhaps few understand this better than Steve Wilson, Customer Service Manager at Cartoon Network’s MMOG – FusionFall, whose customers are primarily boys age 8-13.

To determine what kind of customer support would best serve this audience, Steve’s team turned to focus groups. (To get the most participation, the focus group asked a lot of questions about the game itself, then Steve’s group ‘snuck in’ some questions about their support needs.) Not surprisingly, the findings showed that traditional support vehicles – phone, knowledgebase – didn’t work for this group. Instead, they discovered several recurrent themes. Read more »