Ramesh Patel, Founder, Kumbh Design Inc.
Live chat is more convenient than addressing queries over the phone
Kumbh Design is an Ahmedabad-based design firm specialising in Web site design, logos, corporate identities and brochures. Their clients, based in India and abroad, are a mixed set, ranging from technology companies to fan sites.
About seven months ago, we decided to incorporate a Live Chat system powered by Boldchat into our site. It was to give us direct contact with visitors and prospective customers.
Being an online business that caters to clients from all over the world, we needed a simple, convenient system to interact with people. Live chat is certainly more convenient for us than addressing queries over the phone, and more so for our customers. Ever since we implemented the service, we’ve seen a definite increase in the number of people approaching us for queries. We’ve even converted a number of these into clients.
We are a small team right now, and monitoring the chat in rotation works for us. However, as we get bigger and the queries increase, having someone dedicated to addressing queries will be a good idea.
Would we recommend implementing a Live Chat service to other companies in the same line of business? Definitely! It makes us approachable to customers who aren’t local and/or don’t want to be inconvenienced by having to call us up, especially for minor matters. We are more than satisfied with the effect it has had on the way we do business, and we have no intention of changing that.
“It certainly wasn’t profitable to have someone to constantly monitor the chat”
Vishal Verma, Founder/President, Innovision India
Innovision India, established in 1997, is a Web design and graphics firm based in Gurgaon. Their services also include search engine optimisation and Web maintenance. In addition to their Indian clientele, they cater to clients from the USA, Canada, Germany and Holland, among others.
We decided to implement a Live Chat service on our Web site to deal with queries from prospective customers and generate business by converting them to clients.
We found that the idea was wrong for us from the get-go. Our business doesn’t depend on location, and a large number of people who contact us for our services are from abroad. Due to time zone differences, their working hours rarely matched with ours, and they couldn’t take advantage of the Live Chat system-they prefer to contact us via e-mail or telephone. When they do need to chat with us, clients prefer other, more feature-rich chat tools such as Yahoo! and MSN Messenger.
Another concern for us was the waste of manpower. It certainly wasn’t profitable to have someone to constantly monitor the chat-on slow days, the operators would end up waiting hours for nothing.
Any business looking to implement such a system needs to take a look at their target audience and their timings. Since the chat can be online only during working hours, it is important to know whether prospective clients will visit your site during that time. Only then does it justify the time investment required.