Live Chat at Its Worst - Technology Evangelist

Offering live chat on websites can be a great way to connect with customers, but like most tools, it's only as good as the people using it.

Take, for example, a recent experience I had with Home Depot where I decided to use the live chat feature to get answers to a few questions that should have been included in their product listings.

Clicking the live chat link brought up this screen, where I was told a "Specialist" would be with me shortly:

I waited. And waited. Like a phone queue, it occasionally repeated the hold message for my reading pleasure. I don't remember how long it was between messages, but it was at least a couple minutes.

Mind you, I wasn't staring intently at this chat window, since there are plenty of other distractions on my computer to help kill time waiting for Home Depot to care about the $800 worth of stuff in my shopping cart.

Eventually, I toggled back over to find this message waiting for me:

My "specialist" Dineshia decided that, after holding for probably 15 minutes, that I wasn't really interested in chatting?

Why did this happen? My guess is that Dineshia's performance is measured based on completed chats, and possibly how fast chats are completed. Had Dineshia simple waited for me to respond his or her stats would have been skewed (but I would have gotten my questions answered).

In my opinion, this is a horrible use of live chat since the cost of waiting for my response is near zero. Unlike a phone call, a chat support person can manage many simultaneous conversations so keeping my chat live in the background would have been a better option from a customer support perspective.

This was not a technical problem, but a poor use of technology.

Make sure your customer support incentives are aligned with your customer's needs to avoid situations like this.

Focusing the window may have helped. I may have also gotten up to get a Fresca. Not sure.

I agree that there does need to be some outer limit on when it's acceptible to close a window, but it's doesn't really seem like it would be a problem for a chat operator to manage dozens of dormant chats for longer than I experienced.

Yeah, similar sites like Cha-Cha suffer from poor guides. The concept is great - but without highly trained personal - you still get bad service.

Steven H. Krein, CEO of OrganizedWisdom Health (a medical based search site) makes some great points about why future internet searches will need better organization with some (intelligent) human intervention.

I think the main thing is - the internet is full of misinformation and advertisements and we're arriving at a point where we need some additional distinctions drawn to identify actual content online.

Even chat operators have a limited capacity. A customer that finally got through the waiting time expects relatively immediate responses from then on. Keeping an unlimited number of active customers (i.e. no time-out) creates the risk that their unexpected "waking up" generates just too many threads for the operator to deal with in a timely fashion. So I think bumping inactive customers off is just plain common sense. What would be useful is an alert that let's me know when my waiting time is off even if the browser is in the background.

Good point, Mallku. Some of the best live chat I've seen told me how long I'd likely have to wait. That's easier to deal with than Home Depot's unknown queue.

This is a huge problem with large corporations trying to implement "new" technology onto their websites (by new, I mean to them, not the rest of the world). Often, these corporations will jump on the chat bandwagon, or blog bandwagon (for example) with little or no clue of how to properly implement it. The result is poor chat sessions that just end up frustrating the customer even more.

Comments

1. Posted by: Gabe on December 27, 2007 11:52 AM:

This is a technical issue as well. The chat should focus the window when a real person is available.

How long was it between the time you last looked and the time you had been disconnected? My guess is that the customer support reps have a specific amount of time that they are supposed to wait before moving on to the next person in line, and this makes sense.

The difference between holding online vs. on the phone is that you could easily walk away from your computer (or in your case, browse other sites) and not return for days, but the window could still be open. When you are on hold via phone, you are pretty much sure to be there until you have hung up.

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