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.

The Home Depot associate has no control over when the chat will appear in their box. Those please wait responses are computer generated. After your chat comes to the associate the greeting is listed and you then have 2 minutes to respond before another computer generated message is sent asking if you want to continue the chat. After two additional minutes the next message comes up advising you that the associate is going to end the chat if you do not respond and then after another minute the closing comes. So you actually had ample time to respond to the associate. Then the computer automatically ends the chat due to lack of response. You criticized the associate and she did her job. You failed to respond at the appropriate time. If you wanted an immediate response you should have went to a local store or called. How can you be so critical of something that you don't seem to understand at all and of the associate. It is like you that make simple things hard. Before you begin to complain, educate yourself about the issue. Your complaint may end up being an inner issue. Everything you complained about was because you didn't understand or you are the type of person that doesn't need to be online chatting. It isn't for everyone.

Nicole, I imagine you're not speaking on behalf of Home Depot, but think about what you're saying for a second: "The customer is wrong."

That's not exactly the kind of thing you want to say to someone who's spent money at your store in the past and has plenty of choices on where to spend money in the future.

But, you are wrong, Ed. Unfortunately, we have grown up to think that the "customer is always right", but you and I both know that is not true.

Right or wrong, Sears got my business on that order. Insulting me as a strategy to win my business back next time around is a rather strange strategy.

As Gabe pointed out earlier in the comments, the problem could have been solved by focusing the window when a customer service rep was finally available.

That didn't happen, which led to this blog post, and now to this unfortunate exchange.

I agree. I work in a call center (not HD) and I have to tell customers that they are wrong all the time. If a customer thinks the price is $50 less than what it is, for example, they are wrong, and I am required to inform them of that. Anyone that still lives by the "customer is always right" moto, resides in a fantasy world.

I guess I live in a "fantasy world". Every place I shop, I expect the employee to reduce the price by $50, if that's what I think the price is. If not, I will go to a place where "the customer is right". Usually I have to go to about 10 different places though.......

Well, it sounds like their are many cry-babies that log onto this site. Cry yourself a discount babies.

The thing that's been missed in recent comments is that this is not a customer service issue. It's a technology issue. If Home Depot's system was more tolerant of customers who get distracted during long wait times during the launch of live chat sessions (in a technical sense) the customer experience and the customer service experience could likely both be improved.

Hi Ed,
Let me start by saying that I don't work at Home Depot. But I do have an understanding of live chat business needs and the reality of the technology.

It would be poor customer service to post a wait time when the chat agent is not in control of how long the chat they are on is going to be. An average chat may be 10 minutes, but that can give you a range from 1 minute to an hour, and it's up to the customer to decide how long they need to keep that conversation going.

Most chat systems are set to time out automatically after 2 to 3 minutes with no entry from the customer. This is not a decision made by the chat agent, it's a parameter set by the company. From a business perspective, it's counter efficient to keep chats open for indeterminate amounts of time. Quite often customers will request a chat session, then find their own answers, or lose interest, or have to go and answer the phone or put the baby to sleep, etc. From a business perspective there has to be a time limit on how long the chat agent is expected to wait.

I would be curious to know what Home Depot had to say when you contacted them about your experience and asked questions. I'm assuming you gave them the opportunity to discuss the situation with you before criticizing them in public.

I'm not so sure about LivePerson's business packages but I think they only offer a limited number of live chat operators, depending on the package that you sign up with.

www.live247support , on one hand, is offering unlimited live chat operators with per minute billing starting from just 6 cents.

the horrible live chat customer service experienced by Ed was not a technical issue nor poor use of technology. It was a result of bad marketing strategy.

www.live247support.com website is plain and simple and i think that is what an e-commerce website should look like.

Agreed that chat operators have limited capacity to multi-task or handle a number of simultaneous customer inquiries popping up on their chat box. The chat system host should have provided Home Depot a better option or a better business package suitable to its need so as to avoid this to happen.

it seems not logical to conclude that if you have bad live chat customer service experience, you'd blame the live chat software or the live chat service provider. kirk may be right. it might have been caused by a bad marketing strategy on the part of LivePerson to provide a need of their client.

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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