Live Support – What is it & why it should be kept in-house
Online stores have given vendors the unbeatable advantage of staying open 24/7 without undergoing any physical ordeal themselves. Thanks to the technology, that has automated most of the setup for vendors operating online by automatically accepting orders and closing sales, estore owners do not have to stay up to attend to their customers. Before online shops became the ‘it’ way of business, many buyers used to place their orders by phone. This served them in two ways.It helped them place their orders and have their queries answered.
Many newbie businesses have gotten carried away with the concept of selling online that they have ignored the concept of customer support altogether. However, with the passage of time, there has been an increasing need of offering live support.
What is Live Support?
Live Support allows webmasters to communicate with their customers during real-time. In simpler words, it is customer support in the form of online chat. There are many software which have enabled sellers and webmasters to get hold of prospective clients as well as customers visiting their websites with ease.
Despite the ease offered by life support software, there is still a need to have a sales representative online in order to facilitate the customers and attend to their queries. This is a hectic job which is mostly outsourced by small businesses but is it really the smart thing to do?
Should you outsource Live Support?
Outsourcing may seem like the best, cost-effective option these days if you do not mind the quality of service. If you do mind however, it is best to keep it in-house. Outsourcing might be the most cost-effective way to go for new businesses but it definitely is not the best. Hiring someone from the developing countries, such as India or Philippines etc, to attend to your customers is wrong on so many levels.
Firstly, an employee, who is on the other side of the world, cannot possibly know a lot about your product. It takes some time to learn about the product, but as a newbie business trying to fetch customers, that is not an education you afford to give. The difference in time zones further creates problems for your customers when they fail to find an operator online.
Despite the fact that it is the age and time of globalisation, there is a general mistrust regarding businesses that aren’t exactly local. By outsourcing live support, you directly put someone, whose native language (most likely) isn’t even English, in a direct position to communicate to your customers and it does not exactly send out the best message.
Because of these and countless other reasons, you should always keep live support in-house. Agree? Disagree? Let the world know what you think by posting a comment.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 at 4:48 am and is filed under eCommerce, Retail, Wholesale. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
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Well since all the online stores do not have the specified working hours hence the customers order their products as when they find time also the live support is not required at all times, unless or until there are queries regarding the item or the customer needs to return purchased goods.
Live support is now very popular. Every one wanna get this service . I think your article is helpful.
Hey you are absolutely right. I agree with you. There is this site which I am sure has outsourced their live support to someone in India. I can never get the support representative live and he sure as hell cannot speak English either. It’s frustrating.
I actually work as a Live Support representative and it’s true that I do not stay online 24/7. That’s physically impossible. But while I’m offline, the software we’re using allows customers to drop in their queries in the form of tickets and I respond to them whenever I come online.