You don't need live chat on your website(timharek.no) |
You don't need live chat on your website(timharek.no) |
That is annoying as hell. "How can our company help your company?" You already do! You don't need to convert your existing customers. It's even worse when it's my own company. No, you can't sell a support contract to yourself.
Yes, I can go solely through internal knowledge bases, or only ever seek information through our existing support rep. But why would I do that when the exact information I need is already on the public Internet? Just let me actually see it without nagging me to buy something I either already bought or can't buy. The vast majority of information I seek out is for products I already use, not products I might use if you can get me to talk to a salesperson.
I get it from the perspective of the business. Hey, if a conversion rate goes up after we do this, then we should have done it. Full stop. But it's a locally optimal solution that ruins the web globally. They've done the same thing to e-mail. My work e-mail is nonstop flooded with small businesses that think they can solve a problem for my business. I'm just a developer! I can't sign a support agreement with you. I don't care if your project management software is better than whatever we're already using. I don't care if you can help us hire people. I'm not a project manager and I'm not HR. To you, it seems costless to just send out bulk emails to every employee of a company, knowing at least some of them will actually be interested, and any non-zero conversion rate for a zero-cost cold call strategy is worth it.
But you've poisoned the commons! E-mail is now an annoyance rather than useful. I spend more time deleting spam than reading anything. I spend more time closing popups than consuming the content from you that would be useful to me that I was already trying to consume.
This is Moloch in action. Is it worth it for the world to turn every form of information transmission into more annoyance than utility so that some tiny percentage of small businesses can survive a few years longer than they might have otherwise? I see how it is worth it to the owner of the business. Is it worth it to the rest of us who make up the overwhelming majority of humanity?
Also they often overlay and can block a cookie consent acceptance button etc.
There is no reason for them to fire on every page, isolating them to a support page is surely enough
* Live Chat
* Cookie Banners
* Newsletter-Offers
* Java-Script moving things around
Remove the entire EU-Regulation upon Cookie-Banners. I would be thankful. A service is allowed implicitly to store Cookies or any other mean of "remembering" when a login is used interactively by the user. If the user doesn't login itself you aren't allowed to store any data about the users.
And if they want do something for the environment, battery-runtime, reliability and user experience. Require that any public founded website must work without Java-Script.
The legislation is fine, it literally is, if you want to track someone you must tell them.
Draws a dark shadow on the regulation. Smells like lobbying. They gather and store user data from other websites. The opposite of what should be done.
The benefit of cookie banners is that you know to stay away from the website if possible.
I’ve worked in support and I’ve also (like almost anyone) used support to get problems solved, and the urgency of a phone call or a live chat is, most of the time, not only uncalled for in almost every case but actually worse than the alternative:
For the support example specifically, I believe the best way to resolve most issues is to: 1) get as much necessary information as possible in the first question, whether that’s automatically collected, or submitted through a form etc 2) have it quickly end up in the hand of a technically competent person who can work, in peace, to resolve the issue. Chat or phone calls may seem good because it feels intuitively like it speeds up communication, but it doesn’t. It only creates urgency and frustration on both ends that does nothing to speed up resolution, and often falls back to non-realtime anyway.
As for selling stuff, bots have never been a good idea. If you have good UX and clear information there’s no need for a half baked script to guess what the user wants to navigate to, because they can just navigate there themselves.
Just this week, I had to reach REI because a package showing as delivered was not actually delivered. The carrier researched the problem and told me that I needed to contact the seller. I clicked Live Chat from REI support page, picked from few menu options, got connected to an agent, and within a few mins had sent me out a new order plus refunded me for one item they no longer had in stock. During the chat I had the option to either elect for a new order, or to have full refund. Being on standby "like a radio operator" allowed quick exchange and resolution. I much preferred this to a phone call or elongated email exchange. My POV is that different people have different tastes/preferences concerning the channels they want to use to receive support. I think it is good when companies offer multiple options.
Many times it’s not that you didn’t show enough info on your site, it’s that you purposely withheld info on the site to force a live chat requiring a name and email or you can provide good service in the chat and ask for it.
What the consumer wishes were true and what it requires to make a sale are unfortunately at odds in many businesses. It’s still not a perfect world.
When companies do chat and it actually helps the user, all good. When it's done entirely to help the company by reducing salaries for real staff / trying to prevent users getting in touch / promoting some feature or product the user didn't want in the first place... - then it's generally all bad.
We'd almost all agree that:
1. Things that get in the way of solving customer needs are annoying. Most modals, popups, proactive notification that don't happen at the right time. This could include chat, email capture, cookie banners, chat bots, popovers.
2. For almost every business there are some sets of customer needs that require a conversation with a human. This could be building trust, conveying nuance of someone's situation, dealing with an exceptional case, helping someone make an ambiguous decision, etc..
3. Doing customer communication well requires investment and commitment from the business. (In almost all businesses you are serving customers at scale, where 1 representative at the company is serving anywhere to 100s to 1000s of customers, this ratio is important and varies based on LTV / productivity support etc)
I have some experience here. I cofounded Olark live chat (https://olark.com) in 2007. We've seen customers see significant boosts in building trust as demonstrated by chats leading to repeat shoppers and increased retention (this holds across SaaS and e-commerce) when support is done well. This trust also translates to front of the funnel lead growth and word-of-mouth as well (linking to case studies seems like too much for HN).
Where customers suffer is when chat is seen as a cost savings device at companies not committed to service, or when marketing thinks you can just spam the heck out of customers and see results -- notably there are results -- but they tradeoff customer goodwill -- these are often the same folks who love popups - and interstitials -- or kind of face customer service with qualifying bots.
Love seeing this conversation on HN btw.
The mix of language/cultural differences and legal/social uncertainties sometimes makes it hard to know what I need to apply or register for something. Information may not available on websites, sometimes because the answer depends on your personal circumstances, sometimes because the websites are just old or incomplete.
I like sending e-mails. But e-mails are just not taken as seriously; I might wait a week for a response, only to get a curt "That is not possible", which doesn't clarify my situation or point me in the right direction.
If I call, I might have to wait a minute, or I might have to wait an hour. I don't get the freedom to wait that long for a call during work hours, and customer service might not be open late at night. In a phone-call I am also limited by my ability to speak a different language on my feet; I often cannot fully express what I want without some considerable forethought.
An in-person appointment would be good, but that might have to be booked weeks or (during Covid) months in advance. It may require travelling across the country. And I may not even know what I actually need or want from the appointment, so I don't know what supporting documentation etc. to bring.
Live chat solves all these problems. It is asynchronous, so I can stop, think about, and re-read the conversations. Where the language barrier becomes a problem, I can look up definitions. And I get a fast response, which can be followed up with additional questions if my problem is not quite solved. This is much better than waiting days or weeks only to get a non-answer because I asked the wrong question.
Intrusive live chat pop-ups are obnoxious, as are "robot menus", but I love the option to chat live with a human. It has helped me many times.
There's a mantra in UX that says: "you are not your users". The way I interpret that mantra is that you shouldn't assume that your opinions, preferences, motivations and behaviors are the same as other users'. In other words, a single experience or use case will never cover 100% of the needs of all users.
Sorry to state the obvious, but different people have different needs, and they see value in different things. To demand that "XYZ" stops because one person doesn't like it is so wrong and myopic... it's actually a pet peeve of mine. It's fine to share your experience "When I open my email, I do XYZ" but for the love of god, never make the sweeping assumption that your experience covers everybody else's' needs or opinions.
I thought it was a really clever idea, especially for those interactions where someone is browsing at 9:30pm and wouldn't call but would feel fine texting with a salesperson who was just up watching TV.
Fast forward to the future and it's become dystopian like everything else on the web. It's an excuse to remove phone numbers and email addresses, it replaces support with bots, it's not truly async because you can't easily do other things while waiting for a response or they close the connection and you start over with another person and no history.
From the company-side, live chat has generated tons of leads for us vs. just an email address. It's also easier to manage these leads inside live chat software vs. a messy inbox.
From the customer-side, it's very annoying to do quick and frequent back-and-forth conversation via email. Replies take way longer and I want to see the entire conversation at once vs. in an email thread. Live chat fills the space of being as fast as phone calls but as convenient as email. There are times when I need instant support but can't call (e.g. if I'm in a noisy cafe and I need to resolve something while I have information pulled up on my laptop).
People (and customers) do hold all of these different opinions and it's sometimes hard to please them all. As a business, should we try to cater to everyone, or just a certain group? In Europe it's different from America.
Personally I do think there's a weird inflection point where once your chat bot gets so fully featured it becomes a website within a website which seems... Unnecessarily small.
Added in is the modern trend to try to make immensely complicated things like "global commerce" look like it takes two button clicks. Abstractions are good, but something, somewhere, should tell me how my inputs to this system affect what happens.
And I mean live chat. Me chatting with a bot is not a live chat.
Customer support via chat on the other hand is amazing.
It comes down to implementation and the gripe about nagging is fair, but the utility of the thing is still valid and like another commenter mentioned it's a great thing that's happened to customer service.
1) Sales chat
2) Support chat
Both of them I prefer over emailing, calling or writing into some contact box and receive an answer days later. Live chat windows are in almost 100% of the cases I've interacted with them quicker, as they tell you if someone is online and how many minutes you are expected to wait.
Sometimes 1) can be spammy when they make sounds or open automatically but I still prefer to ask a quick product question before signing up for something via the chat than emailing someone.
If I'm on a company website for tech support, or have problems with an order, I've seen real live chats, where there's a person on the other side, be useful. It's better than, say, abandoning a complicated order, calling in, and seeing if the agent can find you cart, etc.
I like chat when I need it, no digging through a dark pattern looking for support contacts. It also tells me that customer service is at least somewhat of a priority for this company. Otherwise I just ignore.
My logitech mouse1 button started doing that thing where it momentarily unclicks while dragging. If you're a heavy mouse user you've probably experienced it and how frustrating it is.
In this case, the mouse wasn't cheap and it was only 6 months or so old when this happened.
The automatic Amazon process told me to go to Logitech about it, so I did. The obviously automated chat bot was actually helpful (as long as you understood it was automatic), although it had a bug where it asked for a TOTP code but if you entered it into the chat box instead of pressing a "totp" button to enter it, it would say it doesn't understand and restart the whole long process.
Okay, so that's a frustratingly bad chat bot, but once I had realised what had happened I typed AGENT to get an agent and the live customer service agent was incredibly helpful. They understood my frustration with dealing with the automatic process and that it had gone wrong. They understood my complaint with the product. They were helpful in informing me that yes, the mouse was covered by warranty and that they could replace it if I could get a "notice to refuse service" from Amazon.
This gave then me what I needed to go back to the amazon process to get them to accept it as a return by saying I had spoken to Logitech and that Amazon needed to replace or refuse service.
Between the two chat boxes, the logitech one, despite being a more buggy experience, was far more helpful once I got to a person.
On the other hand, the amazon experience was miserable. They asked me if I wanted a QR code or a printed return label. I said, "Can I do both?" and they answered "Yes".
They then waited. A minute or so later I realised they were waiting for a prompt and said, "Okay, send me both please" and they said, "You have to pick one, QR code or printed label".
I don't know with Amazon if I was speaking to a human or not. This is very frustrating compared to the Logitech experience where I went from what was obviously an automatic process to obviously a human.
Overall, this was probably quicker and easier than had I tried to pick up a phone. Crucially though it still hinged on having a human in the loop who was very helpful.
Then you got connected to a human who asked you for a confirmation from Amazon. You went back to Amazon and asked them for a return, again.
You had a "miserable" experience with the process, there, but in the end got your return label.
Yeah, really sounds like an excellent experience.
Yes if the live chat window is annoying you that you should buy something or sign up for a newsletter that is super annoying.
But if you really need help and there is a human within one second on the other hand this is amazing.
Also vice versa. If I'm online on Crisp or Intercom it is super easy to understand what my customer tries to do and help them within a second.
Not everything is negative about live chats, as always :D
I especially like how chats are asynchronous, yet feel immediate. And you can think about what you want to say, much like an email, without feeling like you might need to wait 3 days for a response.
And relatedly amazon who actually have a useful chatbot (i don't have much positive to say about amazon these days but 1 click purchase and chatbot implementation is still very strong)
i presume they do, though, and i wouldn't be surprised if it's not so great!
It went perfectly well but to this day I'm not sure if I was speaking to a robot or not.
In this way, your visitor community could help you manage customer relations and also talk about your product live.
That said, especially in Saas, I think it hardly makes sense to keep it on after reaching a certain point.
I can see how it could make sense in eCommerce though.
After living in South America for a stint, I have an entirely new appreciation for WhatsApp for desktop and sites that include one-click integration.
Interesting thing I noticed for dev tools is chats is useless because users start to paste huge amount of code or configuration into the chat which makes it super hard for both sides so basically just use discord or slack for dev support :)
IMHO this is the only acceptable method for having a chat feature on a site.
Readers are commenting that chat increases "conversions" (I guess that means sales). I'd be interested to see what convincing but wrong chatbots do do conversions and to ongoing customer numbers.
I had to keep the relevant tab open and actively watch it because there is no sane method to get the notification if it's in background. Can't get distracted for too long, gotta actively watch that stupid chat for when someone comes in or replies after "I need a few minutes to do something for you, please hold on".
Also, I was nervous that any accidental navigation actions (like clicking on some page link) I take in my browser would lead to loss of that chat session. Basically, I was trying to not breathe in the direction of that chat and hope that it would work. I mean, it shouldn't, but I've seen it happen.
Honestly, I'd rather see a bunch of links to various messaging platforms. Or a phone number I can send a text to. Humans or machines, short or long response times - at least I know the underlying technologies are reliable.
Why on earth does the chat person need ask me my account number yet again? I am logged in to the website, they should be able to see that I am Account # 820914 and currently viewing Order # 788321.
Ensuring that this sort of context communication as the lowest bar for an in-app chat would go a long way towards making me prefer it to a conversation where I have to gather and route relevant information.
Or a phone number that you can actually call and which is picked up by a human within a reasonable time frame and who is actually empowered to solve your problem.
And to my surprise that actually still exists.
Just recently I had a stellar experience with the support of my hosting provider.
30 seconds wait, a person who knew what I'm talking about. Solving the problem instantly by mailing the relevant form, while we still chatted. All resolved in less than 5 minutes.
For what it's worth: that was hostpoint.ch. I'm not invested in any way. Just a very happy customer after 2 really good support experiences (one by email)
There's a bad idea which keeps coming back which are attempts to replace asynchronous communications (web forums, emails, ...) with more synchronous communications such as chat sessions, discord, etc. I can't wait until somebody tries making you go to a waiting area in "the metaverse" and spend an hour looking like a dork waiting for help. Lately I have been appreciating how you can a question to a site like
https://www.dpreview.com/forums
probably get a bogus answer in an hour but have multiple great answers in two weeks.
The ones that are just a shitty interface to a FAQ suck, though. I don't even like it when they're as you describe, because its eventually turning into an actual chat with a real person is kinda-hidden functionality.
Fortunately, many chatbots in my experience will indeed switch over to human support if I write "I want to speak with a human". I'm glad they take that into account.
Another annoying option is getting an auto reply about no-one being available; or being asked for personal data, sometimes before even starting the chat.
Key point here. Chatbots are a universal "please despise my company" tool.
If you don't have a live human available - don't show me the chat button.
But my bank, which is horrible is many ways, has implemented it exactly right and the chat has been my main way of interacting with them for a year or so. It starts out with a chatbot listing common FAQ topic but also says that at any point I can just type "Asesor" (Advisor) to be connected to a human, which usually takes little less than a minute. They can then trigger authentication from within the chat so they can actually do basic things related to the products (but not things like e.g. doing transfers).
Amazon gets points for having the worst implementation I’ve seen. Although it doesn’t pop up and spam you, if you click through on the website or app, it connects you to an incompetent chat bot.
Third parties provide direct links to Amazon’s competent chat bot that can actually handle basic requests.
Seriously, WTF are they thinking?!?
I work configuring contact center software. Chat agents are often more experienced, "tech savvy", and less overloaded than phone agents too. And Chat is harder to ignore than Email, which Agents can just give a token reply to punt it back to the pending queue.
If the live chat service connects me to a human who is able to resolve my query in a timely manner, I'll take that any day.
Phoning a large company can result in waiting in a call queue for a long time. My attention is on the phone call instead of anything else. A live chat window can be relatively ignored and checked once in a while.
Emailing a large company can result in waiting for a reply taking 3-5 business years. Live chat gets me a response relatively quickly.
A live chat service that does not provide an easy means of interacting with a human and which instead easily allows getting stuck in a bot loop is a great example of poor customer service and, for me, a great way of quickly finding out who to not do business with.
That said, a poor live chat service for a business that I absolutely have to contact (most recently when terminating internet service after moving house) is an exercise in frustration and annoyance that is hard to replicate in any other manner.
A lot of the chat bubbles that I see flash in the corner, and make the title of the page flash as well; with lots of annoying bleeps and bloops.
I also find that sales is very trend driven. Currently they're trendy, but I hope that sales websites learn that you can't just stick things in people's faces all the time.
Having a human talk to you thru your screen is a game changer in e-commerce. I personally use amazon customer support chat myself very often.
I run a small saas and I can't count the number of times someone messaged an inquiry and I immediately got in touch with them. They were astounded by the quick response time, which is simply not possible with contact forms.
I might as well use the bloody phone by then.
No.
> An agent will be with you shortly!
> Hi, what can I help you with?
> Agent ended the session.
< I want to know about <something>
> An agent will be with you shortly!
> Please provide:
> your name
> your email
> your phone
No, thanks.
Some Benefits I've noticed to chat support.
1. You have auto documented your case.
2. You can get service asynchronously.
3. Wait times are IME almost non existent on most chats.
4. Better sites have some really good auto support functions in the chat. I've gotten refunds from nothing more than a few mouse clicks.
5. Chat support doesn't have the "not my department I'll transfer you" nightmare.
The main downside is chat support is not consistent across sites some do it really well some do it just OK. All are passable though since most of these chat functions were developed recently its mostly just the company implementation that is bad. Either way I have a better experience than the phone or in person support most times. I suppose the other problem is if the chat support is bad they just ask you to call on the phone anyway but that has been rare for me.
Customer support is and always will be a low paid job where you are interacting with people that basically don't care and are putting in minimal effort. They have no authority or power to do anything but follow a script anyways 99% of the time so there is no point in wasting time talking. The chat allows you to get straight to what they are allowed to do. Anything that makes it quicker to a resolution without waiting is a win for me.
I do agree that I despise when a site uses the chat as an advertising vector. That is easy to solve same as sites with various types of popup and interstitial ads. I just don't patronize the business.
So, like it or not, if you run B2C business - you really need those little annoying chat bubbles.
In my experience, non-technical users dislike ads as well, they just don't know there's something you can do about it.
The most annoying thing though was when people would try to prove that I was actually a chatbot.
Any tips for how to definitively prove you're not a bot (shy of getting on a zoom call, which is what one user suggested!)?
Isn’t the whole point of having chat on your site?
If the need is to speak to a human, help them schedule a phone call with a sales rep / support rep / relevant party.
In any chat I am forced to use, I guarantee I will do my absolute best to radicalize the chat employee against your company and try to convince them to get a different job, or quietly and safely sabotage their employer if they cannot leave. I will make the interaction take as long as possible while doing this, in an effort to drive up costs as much as possible.
I am not alone.
They're faster than e-mails, which can take a few days to get a response to. And they're more convenient than phone calls where I have to stop other stuff while I wait to be connected.
I can also be more precise communicating things like bank accounts and order IDs, especially if I'm chatting in something else than my native language. Plus I can easily record and store the answers since it's just text.
So +1 for live chat from me! Bonus points if the company just uses WhatsApp rather than some box on the website.
I have had to contact some other services via a phone call and it can be a nightmare trying to do anything in a language you can barely speak.
It’s not so bad now that I can speak a bit of Spanish, but I still will choose a company based on if they have a live chat feature that connects to a human.
On the Nespresso website, the chat button covers the Buy button partially. So I ask them “Please confirm my order”. Chats are almost always a horrible implementation.
I hate that as much as live chats on websites and it makes me want to leave the store.
The worst is when retail employees are paid on commission, then you will get harassed endlessly by different employees asking you if you need assistance when all you're trying to do is look at a damned rubber spatula (I'm looking at you Williams Sonoma!) I go out of my way to avoid shopping at those types of places. I want to get in and get out with as little disruption as possible.
> I don't like hunting for information when I'm shopping online, and would rather get a personal recommendation from a staff member. If you need to fill your website with loads of text, you probably need to do something about your live support staff.
Our individual personal preferences prove next to nothing about what a business "should" do.
Maybe it's true that these popups drive more people away than they convert on average (although I doubt it), but to claim that with any credibility you need to give some evidence.
Developers are somewhat different from the general population in that we like to read documentation rather than going to a person for help. But for almost everyone else having someone to answer a question immediately is the preferred experience.
Anecdotally, I've had far more success DM'ing companies on Twitter -- I don't think I've ever gotten a bot-like, automated response when taking that route, and I've had really specific questions answered quickly and thoroughly.
Humans answer. We learn a lot by speaking to our clients about how they perceive our service.
My car needed it's winter tires put on (in Canada, you need different tires when it gets too cold because rubber compounds are weird). I went to the website to find the phone number but hey there's a new pop up offering live chat!
I chatted. It was obviously pretty quickly it was a bot, as it mistook my last name for my first name and despite repeatedly asking it to correct that it wouldn't. Eventually it had taken down my information and said someone would call to confirm.
No one called.
day later I called them to ask what's up. The person on the phone said that no one who can actually book appointments ever receives any details from the bot.
Some executive decided it would be great to have a bot to book appointments, and so the software team just added a fake one.
Sure, get rid of the intrusive popups and chatbots which don't help. But keep the live chat. It's valuable to the customer.
And don't forget to measure interactions (how many visitors used live chat and on which pages). That might help to convince stakeholders that live chat is useless, especially if you are using paid version of third party live chat.
Some live chat implementations have taken the liberty of requiring an input from your end every X minutes, otherwise the chat terminates. Support agents have literally told me "please wait a while while I look into this" followed by "are we still connected?" just a few minutes later.
However, you can't expect a company to tie up a support person for 48 hours on their screen and you get back to them 2 days later, that is ridiculous.
Where is that line drawn that is not too short and not too long? I don't know, but there has to be a line.
I do think it is my responsibility to continually check my screen to see if there's been an answer to my last message. There are two sides and both must be responsible actors. I think 5 minutes is plenty of time, for example. As the saying goes, "You snooze, you lose."
And it has happened to me and everyone else, of course. BUT, and here is the cool thing - when I get back on the chat, I just say that I was chatting and got distracted...but then the tech support person can go review the notes and quickly get up to speed on the conversation.
I love chat.
If I have to wait for an hour to get support, or navigate through some maze to reach them, or find it difficult to attempt to terminate my contract, I'll go with someone else.
When I really need help or something is wrong, that's not when I want to find out that it is almost impossible to reach them.
Plot twist: the chat bot is also running the Turing test. If the potential customer passes, they can sign up. Otherwise, “Contact us for pricing” and I don’t mean it as an anti-bot feature…
I've had the same experience, and I don't understand why. In both cases, someone needs to read what you write and reply to it with a message. Why can't the just treat email just like live chat?
I dislike live chat because it forces me to wait for their responses (I'm looking at you, Amazon, minutes to type 10 words?) and dedicate time to it instead of putting all the information into an email and sending it and communicating asynchronously.
Being stuck in a loop against what's essentially a buggy ELIZA-Clone however, or a system that somehow is incapable of authenticating me even though I've logged into my account on their website, is not.
I'm gonna really reach out to you if I run into questions but don't automatically expand the chatbox and ruin my experience here. I vividly remember car dealership websites being the worst of them all. They all use the same software more or less and it is just designed to generate leads through coercing visitors and customers.
If everyone would do this then eventually the company would be forced to remove the initial chat bubble since their support is wasting 90% of their time looking at bullshit "No thank you!" answers.
Also, you usually have to close the "subcribe to our newsletter" popup first, to even see the chat window, covering the content you're interested in.
Then you scroll half a screen down, and a new popup with a survey, asking you how much you like their page.
Basically, they actively try to discourage you from seeing the content you actually want to see on the page.
Then I say it doesn’t work, because, clearly it doesn’t. At one point they give me a real person to talk to.
That’s what in-product char is for, right, resolving UX issues?
I’ve been looking for months for a time-tracking tool on MacOS and I never subscribe to any because I throw the ball when opening the pricing page and the chat opens. I’m so annoyed I insult them, I really need a time tracking tool for my team.
0: https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/5053699-how-do-i-s...
> If I need assistance, I will most likely do one of the following:
>
> Find a support e-mail.
> Go to a physical store.
> Ask a friend.
> See if I find an unintrusive live chat that I chose to enable.
This is a developer mindset: take the time to solve the puzzle. I get it, but the majority of people don't think that way.
Most people don't want to solve the puzzle. They want to buy the product and get on with their day. Live chat lets them do that, and by the numbers, it works.
A few weeks ago, I had Amazon accidentally send me someone else's package, who lives about five blocks away from me. Not even the same street name. But it reported my own package as having been delivered, which clearly was not the case.
I wrestled with that stupid chatbot for probably two hours. There was no option in its menu for this specific problem. It would only allow to report not receiving something, and the only option given to me was to wait a few more days, or report the wrong item had been delivered, in which case I needed to send it back. I tried calling the support phone number instead, but it was just the same chatbot but over voice, with the same options.
But this wasn't my problem. I had the right package. It just wasn't mine. It wasn't addressed to me. If I returned it, how would they know if it was me who sent it back?
I don't even remember how I finally found a phone number to call that connected me to a human, but I'm pretty sure I had to outside of Amazon to find it. As soon as I got connected to a human and explained what happened, they were more or less instantly able to help me, but it was incredibly frustrating not having the bot itself give me an option to talk to a human. I could only complete it's automated workflows.
Amusingly, the CSR told me to just keep this other guy's package and they'd send him another, even though I could have easily walked down the street and given it to him. Fine, I guess. It was a pressure washer attachment that actually does fit my pressure washer.
I think this assessment was the root of your problem. This wasn't what happened. What happened was two separate things and the mistake was tying them together.
You didn't get your package they claimed to have delivered. Full stop. Deal with that problem.
Second, you received a package addressed to someone else. Deal with that separately.
Actual chat that's passively available on request and makes clear what it is is great. Anything that pops up, makes noise, or otherwise begs for engagement, or isn't "click here for human", is an anti-feature.
I actually just complained about this yesterday- I do _not_ want to have your shitty version of clippy[0][1] flying around the screen, pulsing, and asking if I need help while I'm browsing your page. Stick it on the support/contact page and that's plenty good for me.
You answered that. Thanks.
For what?
I'm intrigued. Why isn't it possible with a contact form? The mechanism for routing a message to you could be literally identical whether it's a chat box or a form. You could get the exact same notification on your system. It'd take you the same amount of time to respond. The only difference I can see is that what you reply with would go to the chat window in their browser instead of their inbox. Perceptually they may see that as faster I guess but it isn't really.
However...
I run a small saas and I can't count the number of times someone messaged an inquiry and I immediately got in touch with them.
What you presumably don't see, or at least ignore, is the number of times people didn't get an immediate response from you and were annoyed by it, or were annoyed by the chat option being there in the first place, or who didn't even see the chat option, or whose browser failed to load it, or... well... lots of things.
Your claim that users like it is simple survivorship bias - you're only focusing on the positive outcomes.
- E-mail always has a round-trip latency attached, even the best systems will have at least a minute, and you have to do insane amounts of work to keep up with "deliverability" as automated anti-spam systems can and will detect high frequency of incoming emails and downgrade your score, not to mention you have to deal with bullshit like contacting providers that downgraded or outright black-holed you.
- Uploading or sending attachments is a hit-and-miss, there still are providers limiting attachment size to 1MB (looking at you web.de) or with overzealous "security software".
- People will readily ignore the "do not reply below this line" and reply inline, which software like JIRA SD won't recognize or garble up.
- On mobile, people will have to switch between apps, which more often than not even on flagship devices leads to Android killing off the apps between switching for "memory efficiency" and 10+ seconds of load time after each switch.
On-site chat has none of these problems.
Another big chunk of people doesn’t get that they can tap on a chat button, that’s why it flashes and pops up automatically or after a timeout of inactivity, which means a user is probably confused.
I wish there were levels of accessibility in the web tech. So you could specify not only whether a user can see or hear at all, but also select from few levels of computer knowledge, from beginner to confident to 30 years of software development, so everyone could get a reasonable experience.
I had to chat with Verizon reps yesterday to set up my phone. They asked for my device ID or some other configuration numbers. I sarcastically put in 11023 <a lot of zeroes> 47781 (number is fake for this example).
And what appeared in the chat was 11023 47781. The chat app truncated anything between <>. Probably an attempt at XSS protection. But not the behavior I was expecting.
So if a company doesn’t have the capacity to do chat well, why not outsource it to a company that can? Make the integration easy, style the pop up to each company that uses it. Boom, new revenue stream.
In the parent's scenario, it seems likely that the buyer for that enterprise was simply browsing through the site, or perhaps looking at various options, when they found the parent's site, saw that there was a chat and saw the near immediate response, asked a few questions and eventually set up a meeting. To do that over email would have likely taken days.
Source: I've had something like this happen too.
48 hours seems reasonable. Because that support person isn't tied up, they're answering other chats until you reply.
Otherwise, at least several times the time it took the agent to meaningfully respond.
or they'd get worse since someone would somehow figure out a way to prove it's "customer engagement" and therefore valuable.
I can't imagine any other reason but "we don't want the customer to be able to have a record".
If you need the package soon, that’s not great.
If chucky123 replies to the notification immediately via chat or via email the user should get pretty much the same experience. Suggesting this is a benefit of chat doesn't make much sense on a technical level. It isn't. It's just a benefit of replying to contact requests quickly.
If you're going to use email for customer interactions, then respect the conventions of email. I will reply below whatever line I choose. If your software doesn't support that, then answer the phone.
Of course, but I skipped this because I had tried to stay in scope of a text chatting.
Personally, I'd love to see more businesses accepting texts (SMS/Signal/Matrix 3PIDs/WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever works for them - just clearly indicating that they do). I'm an US resident but not a native English speaker - and while I've chatted online a lot, I have relatively limited experience talking to other people. So I have some difficulty talking to people, especially if my and their accents make conversation... less smooth than we both would prefer. Or at least I feel some non-negligible amounts of uneasiness before having to make an actual call. It's not too bad and I'm trying to improve as much as I can, but for some important conversations I'd rather use more reliable methods if those are available.
And to extend on this example, due to family matters I'm currently overseas in Mexico - and I only know very basic Spanish that is nowhere sufficient for any intelligible conversation beyond ordering food or asking for directions. Thankfully, almost every business seem to have a WhatsApp number so with a help of translation software I was able to do quite a bunch of non-trivial requests.
And while my case is maybe not that important (except for me), there are always folks with genuine speech and/or hearing disabilities who could be unable to use voice communication channels at all.
Oh, and texts allow asynchronous communications. I love that I can text my dentist office and schedule an appointment. I don't expect them to reply immediately (they won't if I text off-hours), but I know that they would receive my message and respond when they have a moment. Which is all I need, and my phone will notify me when they reply back.
I really appreciate your reply. It makes it quite clear that there really are cases where voice is not the best option.
Sometimes we are a bit blind to the need of others since we're too much focused on our own preferences and needs
In that sense your comment helps to see things from another perspective and teaches a bit humility in the process.
It's a very old-fashioned attitude; back in the early noughties, many companies thought of the web as essentially an advertising billboard, so the website was placed under the marketing team. That's counterproductive, if the website is actually a core business operation.
Best of all is the system where they ring you back when they are ready
I have almost never encountered this while on hold (the closest I have come is the despicable "we are experiencing unusually long hold times", all the time), and it would be so good. What I particularly hate about the repeated announcements of the type you describe is that they are often much louder than the background music, so, not only do they train me not to pay attention, they force me to turn the volume way down, or hold the phone far from my ear, making it still harder to hear when a human comes on the line.
The trouble is, this was also their only support channel. No phone or web or email.
This went on for nearly 1 week when I was trying to talk to them to unblock my blocked-for-no-reason account a few years ago, and their response times got progressively slower.
In the end a quick message on social media got the account unblocked in 20 minutes. How?!
But you would not believe how many average people refuse to spend even 10 seconds trying to answer own question and insist on reaching out to a human even when the answer is very obviously readily available. Sometimes this makes sense; there's some scams out there and at least speaking to a native English-speaking person is reassuring when it comes to who you trust your money with. But sometimes some people are just miserable and want to annoy others.
Do you have examples?
When I think of FAQs, IIRC almost all the time it seems like they wrote it before release and never upgraded it with actual questions.
But in most cases I think it is both: FAQ isn't updated/relevant && people don't check it.
If the bot can't find the answer, connect to a human. That way, the company's support burden is decreased while still being able to talk to a human if needed.
In theory everything should be clear from the info/documentation/manual, and when it is not so (as it often happens) and something is actually frequently asked, not only an entry in the FAQ list should be added (together with its FGA[0]) but the sheer fact that it is frequently asked should mean that the topic is not clear enough in the info/docs/etc and these should also actually be corrected/updated.
As a "disciplined" user (who actually did read both the FAQ's and the documentation) when you (manage to) contact (via mail/chat or phone) the assistance with a question/doubt there are usually three possibilities:
1) the assistant knows less than you on the topic and cannot answer properly
2) the assistant is competent and manages to answer your question, though with some difficulty (you made an original question)
3) the assistant is competent and answers your question easily because it has already been answered by him/her tens or hundreds of times (your question was not so original but never made it to the published FAQ's)
#3 is the clear sign of a failure in the way FAQ's are managed.
From the BonqQuest glossary https://www.jerkcity.com/glossary.html
I imagine this might be similar.
I suspect the real answer is that when they finally hand you off to a live human being, that human is sitting in the boiler room of a third-tier contractor on a different continent than the main headquarters of the business, and they have no idea what you're currently looking at on your screen. It's technically possible to do this handoff with a complete picture of how the user got there, but that requires a degree of technical integration most companies don't seem to want to pay for.
But presumably you are talking to customer-service agents, not representatives, and what are they supposed to do about it? I share your frustration, but this seems to be just a recipe for spreading that frustration, not for resolving it.
(Unless you meant something else, e.g., you are professionally involved in call-center design, in which case I applaud your being a voice of sense in that domain, and thank you for it!)
Lately I have been facing a breakdown in business processes with my local electric utility that first disconnected my electricity because one of my tenants made a mistake. I think they finally understand that I have three services at two houses at one address, but I went through two periods since then of getting no electric bill for months (which I won’t let slide because the last time they stopped billing me I got disconnected.) Getting that fixed involved waiting three hours on hold which got me talking to regulators again. The crew building the new deck at the other house has also deferred work because they have been unable to get through to anyone there who can turn the service off temporarily so they can work near where the wire comes in.
Because their integration isn't very good.
Ones I've used, as long as you've configured a way to resolve the user, it pops right up in the service side of the chat system.
Be scared of those. They typically use client side JavaScript to read a cookie to know which username is active.
There is usually no verification of that info, so obviously it could be faked by a malicious client.
The docs say that, but it's way too easy to just trust the info rather than setup a properly secure solution.