Free Live Support For Your Web Site
Live Support
As fast as email is, it still does not have the instant interaction that can make the difference on a sale.
If you were able to immediately answer your site visitors questions and concerns, would you likely convert more of them into customers? Of course you would. You not only can resolve any issues for them, but you are adding strong credibility that there is actually "someone behind the web site". I've experienced this technique myself on a couple of different web sites. I know for sure that it helped me place an order with one of them. The difference was being able to talk directly to a customer service representative. My questions concerning shipping were answered and I placed the order. Would I have placed the order otherwise? Perhaps but there is a good chance that I might have "thought about it" which generally equals a lost sale.
Free Options For Live Support
There are quite a few companies which offer live support for a web site for a fee. They can charge anywhere from $9 to $99 a month for their services. Why not do it for free and determine how useful it could be for you? There is a way to do it. The free way to use it on a web site is with the free Yahoo instant messenger program. They offer code which you put on your web site. This code brings up a status window of whether you are available online to chat or not. Here's an example of a live support box for me. If it is showing "Online" then go ahead and send me a message if you want. If it is showing "Offline" then I either am not signed in or I have set the program to show that I am busy right now.
Got a question? Live Support is available by clicking below: |
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Getting Started
To get the Instant Messenger in place on your site, you first need to sign up for a free Yahoo account. That will take all of 30 seconds or so. You can do that here.
You then want to add Instant Messenger to your web page. The web page for that is here.
This page provides the very easy instructions for adding the code to your site:
Once the code is in place, it will automatically monitor when you are online and accepting instant messages. If you don't want to accept messages at that time, you can easily set that.
Privacy Consideration
If you don't want your personal yahoo ID given out for the world to see, you can easily create another one.
Simply click on:
You can then create any new one you want. I created "timkerbersmallbusinesswebsite" for this site.
When you log in with any of your profiles, you are logged in with all. So you don't have to individually log in to separate accounts. (You can change that options also if you wish).
Drawbacks
There is one drawback to this free situation. That is it requires anyone sending you a message to have a yahoo account also. It is also free and the sign up page is short, but not everyone is going to take those steps.
What you are likely to find is that quite a few people already have yahoo accounts or actually do sign up.
I was actually a bit surprised. I had recently implemented it on one of our web sites and that day we received our first Instant Message through the site. It has been used more times than I thought it would.
If your product or service could benefit from direct interaction with your site's visitors, you really have nothing to lose by trying this. It may only take one or two additional sales to make you realize the benefit of having direct interaction with your site's visitors.
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