How to Select Live Chat Technologies and Services

By  Tim Smith, consultant, Bravestorm
Making the right choice of customer interaction methods and technologies is one of the most critical tasks for decision makers in businesses of all sizes. Among the choices that can be employed are well known telephony capabilities, e-mail techniques and emerging internet-based options such as live chat.

Here are four key factors for selecting Live Chat technologies and services.

1. The software should be assessed against this set of 'table-ante' features in concert with the specific needs and intentions of the organization.

- Live chat client (interface a Web site visitor uses)
- Live chat agent console (interface a Web site owner uses)
- Visitor monitoring: ability to identify and view the path the Web site visitor takes.
- Click-to-Call
- Co-browsing: ability of both customer and agent to see the same screens at the same time and for the agent to 'push' destination sites.
- Security (for visitors and chat content)
- Reporting
- Canned messages (pre-written messages used during a chat session)
- Analytics (ability to provide higher order assessments of Web site effectiveness)
- Chat routing (to departments or specific agents)
- Conversion tracking (tracking and analyzing conversion events)
- Integrated Inbound Email management
- Knowledge base (external self-service tool)
- Engagement engine (offering chat invitations proactively)

2. Flexibility to adapt/customization: It is critical that the live chat system be highly adaptable in order to allow the user to optimize the capability with respect to the user's specific business requirements and processes.

3. Availability/reliability: Minimum uptime should be in the 99.9% to 99.99% (three nines to four nines) range.

4. Synergies: Live chat software ought to natively integrate or provide a technical way to integrate with key related business processes.

Observations and Conclusions
Depending on specific customer needs, all of the vendors assessed in the work possess the technology and skills to support large scale chat implementations. Even though specific pricing exercises are not within the scope of this work, it is clear that there are several offers available that can be implemented at very attractive price points. Customers clearly have an opportunity to optimize the price they pay and therefore their return on investment.

Tim Smith has spent more than two decades doing product management and competitive assessment research for companies ranging from large to small, including start-ups. Tim has also done a significant amount of independent market research and consulting, most recently as part of his role as a vice president at Gartner. He is now an independent consultant and can be reached at timsmith99@charter.net.

For access to the entire report, see the Live Chat Market Overview 2008 Study.