I'm thinking of incorporating a live sales chat on my site. For those that have done this, did you find it quite useful and did it convert any more sales that possibly might not have happened?

In my opinion, it is a very good option if you can allocate one of your guy for this.

I myself handle the live chat when I am FREE and I have clients who came just to check the packages after seeing our Ads.

Good luck!

I can't give you any numbers because I'm not in the business. As a client I can tell you that I won't buy anything from a web host without live sales and suppost.

I have neither at the moment. I am considering bringing live sales and support back but it got abused before.

I'm thinking of incorporating a live sales chat on my site. For those that have done this, did you find it quite useful and did it convert any more sales that possibly might not have happened?

Make sure it's manned all the time, otherwise you'll have some annoyed customers. We man it 24/7 (almost- except certain hours when staff is simply unavailable for live help).

Personally I've found it to be a nice feature, but not somthing worth heavy investment. If you do decide to go into it, just do it yourself or hire an individual to be there sometimes, you really don't need it 24x7. You'll also have to make sure that it's not used for support since that'll make tracking tickts a nightmare.

I was purely thinking of just doing it for pre-sales question and just having it open during business hours 9-5 EST.

Personally I've found it to be a nice feature, but not somthing worth heavy investment. If you do decide to go into it, just do it yourself or hire an individual to be there sometimes, you really don't need it 24x7. You'll also have to make sure that it's not used for support since that'll make tracking tickts a nightmare.

There are solutions on the market that solve that problem, either by offering you an integrated solution or allowing you to transfer data from one place to another in an efficient way, is possible to mitigate situations like the you you've described.

I think it's a great idea to have live sales chat, but also live support chat. When an urgent problem comes up, it's great having the peace of mind that you can go and talk to somebody immediately about it.

I think it's a great idea to have live sales chat, but also live support chat. When an urgent problem comes up, it's great having the peace of mind that you can go and talk to somebody immediately about it.

My only reservation with live support is that it can't always be maned.

I do all the support for my company and when a ticket is received, it sends me a text message to my cell phone. So in the middle of the night I can be sleeping and receive a message saying there is a ticket waiting.

One trouble with live sales is that some customers will refuse to understand it's a contact means for sales only. "You don't get it!! My site is down!!! I need help now!!! I signed up only because you had live chat. <insert expletives>"

One other thing is that live chat not perfect and might cause you to lose some sales when the connection is lost, as the potential customer can think you left the discussion. This will hopefully be more than made up for by the successes of live chat though.

Seeing the live chat Offine icon can be a turnoff as it may makes the site look a bit like a closed store.

Whomever mans it must be very familiar with your business and at least a decently skilled salesperson.

Live chat is extremely useful and will pay off i handled properly. As many have stated, the main issue with having it is you loose the ability to really track incoming calls by ticket.

For sales, we generally will take down some information as well as have the transcript emailed to our department's address for future follow-up.

Support, something I would highly recommend is that you only handle the very basic issues through your live chat. Open a ticket for all request regardless if you do it or if you ask them to do it.

We've used PHPLive and it worked ok. We then upgraded to LivePerson and it has worked out nicely for us.

The key is to make sure it is manned during all stated hours and to offer an alternative for clients to get easy sales or support during non-chat hours.

Everything I've seen squares with ldcdc - you can't really offer anything for 'sales' only - if someone has trouble with their website, they generally panic and often contact every outlet available to them at once - especially if one seems more readily available than another.

I can't tell you how many people we had at one time, they'd need to request a reboot for their self-managed server, and would CC every email address on our website.

Live Chat can boost sales dramatically if it is marketed the right way. Like it was stated earlier by someone else, some clients will not sign up with a host that does not have live chat. Just make sure that all potential clients see that you have live chat on the main page and it may convince them to buy a plan from you :)