A couple of weeks ago Chema and I got the idea to try live chat at Open Classifieds main website to provide a better experience for anyone who had questions about classifieds theme purchases or premium solutions while keeping the chat portal away from support purposes. Although we do have a free chat widget for the classifieds websites built with our software but we didn’t have one ready for our main homepage.
Phase 1: is it a good idea?
We had to test the viability of the idea so we did some research and found some articles showing how useful it is to have a live chat on your website and we thought, perhaps, we would be able to get some revenue to Open Classifieds to be able to sponsor changes for next release.
Lots of pages seemed to be giving a positive feedback on implementing a live chat on your website, and taking into account that I had some sales experience we thought we would proceed with executing the idea, see how it goes and make a decision accordingly.
Phase 2: which one should we put?
The work started on implementing a live chat on Open Classifieds main website and the first step was finding resources for some free or open source tools that we could use on the website.
We had a plan to test the idea with a free solution for a couple of weeks and see the results, and if it goes well we proceed with a paid solution. So we went online and came up with some lists of live chat reviews. I reviewed each item on that list carefully, The aspects I wanted to focus on the most when choosing an option were:
– Look and feel
– Visitor interface
– Statistics provided
– User reviews
After picking a couple of options and discussing them with Chema we finally came to choose Flexychat, which was a free chat tool that was enough for our purposes.
Phase 3: The experience
I got some inquiries and questions about the software, functionality and other support questions from existing users whom I tried to answer politely and refer to our FAQs and forums sections. I was getting about 0-2 live visitors a day and receiving around 0-2 offline messages for the period of 2 weeks. While most questions were asking about certain functions in the software I had a couple of intriguing conversations that I will tell you about later on.
There was no increase in sales during those 2 weeks but this doesn’t necessarily indicate that implementing live chat isn’t good for your site.
Phase 4: The anomalies
I had a couple of conversations that took my mind off work just because they were a bit different from normal support requests, but the most surprising one was with a visitor who started by asking a bit about the software (that’s pretty much normal) but after a couple of questions he asked me if I were a male or female! my response was “I would be more than happy to answer any question you have about the software” but regardless of my answer he insisted on knowing whether I am a male or a female. After this conversation and not getting any solid leads we decided to shut the service off.
Phase 5: what we learned
– Live chat didn’t serve our purposes during the 2 weeks trial
– Implementing live chat means you will interrupt the work you’re doing
– “Kinan” doesn’t necessarily show that it’s a male name.
We hope you could learn something from our experience with this, and if you had any similar experience let us know at the comment section below.
[jetpack_subscription_form]
