I am looking at helpcenterlive and thinking about using it for JUST its live chat system. Does anyone else use this? Is it worth it?

I like it because it is free and I plan to make my own some time anyway, but till then. Should I even bother with live chat?

Its up to you, and largely depends on your business model.

For me, live chat was a waste... 90% of all chats weren't of any value. The 10% that weren't said that it would have been just fine to email anyways.

I used it for a little while with my reseller business, but I couldn't stay on it all the time, and I think it looks bad if the site shows live help is offline for long periods of time.

I hope live chat service is good, but also u can't come up with good results using them, most of the chats may be worth none , some may be handfull.

so apart from live chat, i hope that what type of support u provide is more important.

We use live chat extensively on our site and have amazing results. It must be manned by a knowledgable person for a good number of hours a day.

As sarahnoved said, if you can put a guy that knows the job, all the time to answer calls from live chat, it should worth it. Do you plan to do it for sales or technical support ?or both ?

I was looking into this also for a sales persective on the site. I checked out LivePerson at www.liveperson.com, and the features seemed really extensive with what could be done with people on your site. I am a little too worried to bring it to the tech support side though, because of the number of customers we have. How has everyone done on the sales side and on the tech support side?

Originally posted by nybble
Should I even bother with live chat?
Speaking from a customer/consumer point of view - I can say that a company having or not having this feature plays no role in my opinion of them, or my chances of doing business there. I can also say this: if you are going to have it - then you should plan to keep it on and use it a lot, because IMHO it looks bad to see "offline" or "not available". Even though I consider this to be a fluff type feature, it takes the appearance of an important role when it's displayed prominently on your main page.

Catalogcom,
Check out N-Contact at http://www.netlert.com. They have a lot of features that make it really easy to handle a lot of conversations at one time. While people might not buy or not buy because you have live chat customers really appreciate the service if it is well done!