Live Help! Adding Chat to your site

[Jared]

In all the time I've been building sites I've only encountered fewer than a dozen that wanted to have live help or chat abilities within their sites. Although the idea may sound niche or trivial there is actually some positive value to it if its done correctly.

Now I'm no fan of visiting a site only to be hounded by a popup chat window but I'm also not opposed to the idea of a live help link for questions I'd like answered now. Unlike email or a phone call, live help systems in most cases have a graphical means of letting you know that there is an attendant available for questions. Its frustrating waiting for answers to my emails and more frustrating when I'm directed to someones voice mail in part because I think I sound like a dork on the phone.

Good business people do not toss money at things that are economically difficult to justify. It would in fact be silly to employ a person to sit on a domain and wait for a visitor to ask you a question especially if the agency or office was a small one with only minimal staff.

But there is a method to make it work! You can have your cake and eat it to, saving the need to spend the additional money on dedicated support (baby sitter) staff and still provide a live help solution on your website. Now granted many offices have days that agents have a type of desk duty wherein they answer calls for inquiries about properties. Why not an online version of the same thing.

DESK DUTY ONLINE!

Now, a Realtor / Broker website could have a cost effective way to provide a live help solution without the need to sit in front of the web browser 24/7.

By using an open source freely available tool called Crafty Syntax Live Help you can provide a live help solution on your site that is not at all intrusive. I've created a real estate site for a TBE client that has just such a feature. The real power however is not only in the live help solution but in an external third party application that allows the site owner or any person assigned with monitoring permissions to provide help as well. More on this in a moment.

A real estate office really is a team effort and being such any agent can or should be available for site visitors. Wise real estate site owners know that time is of the essence when responding to a potential clients inquiry and potential clients are known to have short attention spans. A live help system would be a major plus in that situation.

So, if agents and other staff members were granted an operator permission each and every can become live help staff with ease. Here is how;

A third party developer created a visual basic client that sits in your computers system tray much like your MSN or Yahoo chat windows do, freeing up your desk space until needed. When a person does visit your site you can track there every move, watch where they navigate and be available for questions in a moments notice should the visitor need assistance. The truly nice thing is when a person visits the site the client application will ring like a telephone (or other available tones) notifying you of the visitors desire to chat.

You could be doing the dishes, watching TV or managing the phones at the desk, as long as any available agent computers are on and has this application installed, potential clients can become clients.

What are your thoughts?

~ Jared

[mussiv]

I think this would be a good feature to add to my real estate site. I had live help on my home satellite website and it was very useful. Have not seen many or anyone using this for a real estate so could definitely give you an edge for that quick response advantage. I'm ready!!!