Website chat is the most effective tool in your online tool chest to ensure the maximizing your ROI on all forms of advertisement and provide the best service to your existing customer base.

There are a lot of options when considering chat and in this article we will break down what they are and why to choose them.

Doing it yourself: This is absolutely an option. However, it’s both costly and it’s not the most effective use of your overhead resources. Typically, the person that would be chatting for your company is one of your Customer Service Representatives (CSRs).

The problem is that your CSR might only get 0-2 chats an hour, and each one of those chat engagements might only last 5 minutes. So you’ve effectively only utilized that CSR 0-10 minutes an hour. And unfortunately, if you are chatting, you cannot multitask. I tried this myself and I failed miserably, leaving multiple customers hanging when they thought I was there to chat. Lastly, trying to chat 24/7 in house would be extraordinarily costly. A $12/hr Customer Service Rep for 24/7 service in-house would cost you over $10,000/month with burden.

Using a Digital Marketing Outsourced Service: These come in many different forms and they typically advertise the low cost.

Digital marketing services are typically outsourced to an overseas entity and/or contracted to people working from home. The person chatting will not know your business or industry, doesn’t know what services you provide, and most importantly, they don’t provide an empathy for your future and current customer’s issue. They copy and paste scripts from an FAQ document and their only objective is to get a name and a phone number or email address. From there, it’s your responsibility to call this customer or email them and find out what is going on. These services are cheap because they provide a cheap product- it’s easy to train someone to just ‘get information’ – it’s difficult for a company to look and act like your company to provide a seamless customer transfer.

HSBO – Home Service Back Office: We are a one of a kind service. We provide live chat services 24/7 as if you were doing it yourself, and we do it specifically for residential service companies. We work vigorously to train our chatters how residential service companies operate, the value of the lead, the services your provide, and most importantly, we provide EMPATHY! This is the number one tool in your company’s tool-chest and we provide it better than anyone.

We don’t just provide leads, we provide customers. Our goal is to decrease bounce-rate on your site by engaging your customers in meaningful empathy-based conversations and providing lots of raving fans.

You’ve spent a lot of money getting that customer to your website, you shouldn’t settle for anything but the best if you are interested in providing the world’s best customer experience!