I would like to set up "Live Help" on our site...but have no clue where to start. Anyone?

Hi heartland -

Your first step will be to sign up with a live chat person. There are quite a few out there to choose from. MonsterCommerce is partnered with LIVEPerson. With the discount available to MonsterCommerce clients, the LIVEPerson service starts out at $49/month (normally $199/month).

Most live chat services, including LIVEPerson, are integrated onto a site by including a small bit of javascript somewhere on the page (the chat provider would supply you with this bit of code). For your MonsterCommerce site, you would include this bit of code in, for instance, your left column HTML editor (or wherever you'd like your live chat icon to appear). You would also have a chat program running on your computer... this program notifies you when someone has requested a chat, allows you to see what page visitors are viewing, and of course allows you to chat with them.

Hope this helps!

Brad

We have been using http://www.livehuman.com/ for years - its the best and has many great features - we found it to be the most cost effective - as long as you have staff to monitor and do not to want to outsource your CS ...this is the way to go.

After doing much legwork - we found this to be the best.

how much does this help with securing a sale?

Thanks for the info Terri!! It seems very cost effective. So, does it have an "away" feature, so that when I'm away from the computer, it will notify the customer and let them leave a message?

Never mind, I answered my own question. thanks again!!! I'm going to try them.

I've used LivePerson for many years and one of the most important features is the ability to monitor traffic in the site - referral address, pages being navigated, etc. There are lots of live chat programs but I'd definitely want the traffic monitoring service. Otherwise folks can just call me on the toll-free line!

After checking out several companies...I think I'm going to do a trial with this company. Live Chat Software. They're up-to-date and more visually appealing to me. I like their skins and icons and if it were me, I would tend to click on them to request help. I'll let you know how they work out. They are also VERY cost effective as well...

For those that do offer this service to their customers...do you get alot of live requests and do you feel that it does increase conversion rates?

Heartland -- how'd you make out with this?

- Jeff

Heartland,

I've been using ProvideSupport.com (is the same company as the one you mentioned). I've been with them for 6 months now. If you do not have tons and tons of traffic on your website, they are great, you do not really need a more sophisticated and pricy program. They do the job for me for now. Almost every time a customer uses live chat I get a sale. The only time the chat doesn't turn into a sale is when customers use it to ask me when an item is back in stock or if that particular pattern is available in a size that is not mentioned on the site, etc. 8 out of 10 times, I do get a sale.

Another great thing that they offer is the ability to see what search words customers used when looking for an item in your store and how they found you. I always click on the referral link and I am able to see how my site ranks in search engine. For the price, it's a great feature. Right now, they do not offer a log of all these search words and referal links (which is a bummer, especially when you are not online to actually see somebody is browsing), but they said these features will be available in a few more months. For the price, I'll be waiting for the upgrades :o)

I am sure you'll be very pleased with their service until your business grows enough to actually need and afford LivePerson.

Just my 2 cents.

I like them...no complaints. Very affordable and very user friendly.

I just ran across this site:

http://www.chatstat.com

They have most services provided for you for FREE!

I'm currently using it on my website: http://www.catch80sports.com/index.asp

I also provided a guide on how to set it up here:
http://forums.monstersmallbusiness.com/ind...showtopic=16995

Based on heartland's recommendation I have tested Providesupport.com's Live Chat software. I was initially impressed, but the deeper I dug the more problems I found. Here are a few major ones:

-No logging. Period. Once a user exits your site you will have no way of tracking when they were there and where they went. You could, of course, do this with other tracking software (such as Google Analytics or Urchin), but it would be nice to have a "history" in Live Chat.
-The web based operator console is missing a lot of functionality.
-The "cobrowser" function will not work with carts. Now I could be wrong about that statement, because my cart doesn't have an SSL certificate and changes domain names during checkout, but Live Chat tech support told me that cobrowsing won't work with "cookie tracking", only "session tracking"
-The online admin interface is confusing, the full featured. You'll waste a lot of time looking for menus and links.

Other than those gripes I like the software. There is a kind of perversion associated with watching people browse your site in real time without them knowing. Being a network administrator I have the constant urge to "kick" people off of my site for one reason or another, which, unfortunately the software cannot do.

I also just tried ChatStat and took it down with 15 minutes. Even when testing it on my own machines internally it didn't display every message I typed. Try typing two or three messages within a second or two and most (if not all of them) will be dropped. The chat client software was also extremely distorted for me, which I don't have time to troubleshoot.

-SC

Hello, this is a great question. We have used liveperson for 1.5 yrs and we really like the software and the ability to "lock in the sale" much like we would in our retail store. There are many different fronts were live help can HELP your business. We have people checking their tracking information and order status, which reduces phone calls in the store. You are also able to give better product details and knowledge to the customer especially becuase we have used most of the products we sell so we can answer some really odd questions. Sometimes customers will be bring issues that they have with our website to our attention and we can fix them. This is great becuase it is hard to keep tracking of all our products and descriptions and sometime we miss stuff. It is also nice to see how many people are on the site and if we have time we can engage them to see if they have questions. The other benefit is the many people will not click the contact us button to ask a question via email, with the liveperson software, if you are not available they are able to send a question via email. For some reason I get 200% more email questions this way than any other source.
Hope this helps you make your decision. Have a great day.
htto://www.snowboards-skateboards.com

I use livehelper and it sucks!! I did what I thought was alot of research to find the best company. I made my final decision based on this website that supposedly rated the top 10 live chat programs. I think it's a bogus site that is probably an affiliate of livehelper. Anyway, livehelper's customer service sucks and the program has alot of flaws. When working properly though, live chat does help me finalize the sale. Good luck.

Renee
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