A lot of people wonder if they can really make web-based support work for their business. Will clients tolerate having to do everything online, waiting for replies to their tickets, wondering about the response time? Don’t people just want to talk to you on the phone?

When it comes right down to it, web-based support is often simply the most cost-effective and efficient way to assist your clients. But there are some things you’ll need to do to make sure that your online support center is convenient, friendly, and responsive from the client’s perspective.

1. Make it easy to find. If people can’t find the link to support on your web site, they’ll quickly assume you simply don’t offer online support. Soon they’ll be on the line with your salespeople demanding service, and getting more frustrated by the moment. It’s a bad situation, and one which can generally be avoided very easily by making sure your support center is highly visible. If you look at our main site, you’ll see that support is available right from the menu bar at the top of every page, and then again at the bottom of the sidebar. Don’t be afraid to put links in more than one location.
2. Make sure help is available quickly. Any frequently asked questions should be available on the site with no interaction necessary. Clients will appreciate knowing that any questions they have are probably already answered on your web site, so make sure to set up a knowledge base with in-depth answers, descriptions, and pictures to make sure everyone gets the message. If you’re using ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software, you can even set the software up to automatically search the knowledge base for relevant articles before each ticket is submitted. You can’t beat zero wait-time. Another great way to make your clients feel well-support is by offering live chat. Even if the only thing you can tell the client in chat is that “this is a complicated issue that we’ll have to look into through a support ticket,” they’ll feel better knowing that there is a reason they are waiting and that they have actually made contact with someone at your company. And live chat is far more efficient than phone support, as a single operator can handle more than just a single chat at a time.
3. Make sure your clients know what to expect. Make information about the length of your queue and the average response time readily available. There is nothing worse than submitting a support request and having no way to know whether it will be answered in one hour, or one month. So make a commitment to answer tickets within a given length of time, and stick to it.
4. Exceed expectations. It’s better to over-estimate your response time than to under-estimate it. No one ever got upset because the answer to their ticket came in 5 hours sooner than they had thought it would. In our own support center, for example, we promise a response from support within 1 business day. In practice, most tickets are answered within just a few hours. Be sure to pay attention to the newest tickets in your queue as well as the oldest. If someone you just responded to is asking for clarification, it’ll be much more valuable to them to get an answer in 2 minutes than it would have been for someone with a more complex support request to receive an answer 2 minutes sooner. You might also consider using a survey service to determine what areas your customers would most like to see improvement in.
5. Be friendly. Of course you want to maintain a level of professionalism in all of your communications with clients, but don’t be so corporate that people can’t understand you. Let people know that you empathize with their situation and genuinely want to help them. Don’t make people feel like they are lost in a bureaucracy; they will likely find solace in the arms of your competitors.

The main thing to remember is just to approach the situation from the client’s perspective. How would you want things to work if you were in their position? The idea is to offer them a support experience that, when all is said and done, will actually be better than what they could have had if they had reached you on the phone. The web is a truly robust medium for doing exactly that; you just have to put a little planning into designing the right type of experience.

Here are a couple of new auto-invite graphics that you can now use with ActiveCampaign Live Chat Software. You can view all of our graphics available on our graphics page. If you have any suggestions or comments let us know!

Download This Auto Invite

Download This Auto Invite

We just released the latest version of Live Chat Software and Live Chat Desktop.

This new version of Live Chat has been in testing for some time and has shown a significant increase in speed and reduction in used resources on the server. Both the web and desktop clients have been updated with these speed and resource changes.

Download the updates and start chatting faster today!

We just released Live Chat version 1.4. Feature wise you will have a couple newly added items – but the big change is the admin interface.

The interface has been changed to be similar to our other products in the ActiveCampaign product line.

Learn more about TrioLive at:

• Live Chat Software (self-hosted version)
• Hosted Live Chat Service

We’ve just released a new version of our Live Chat web software (1.36) along with its Desktop client (1.03). In the web version, we’ve implemented quite a few optimizations to increase speed, particularly with visitors checking in with the server via tracking, and we’re excited about that. But the Desktop client, which hasn’t been updated on our servers in a while, has received quite a few updates — particularly to its look and feel — so we’re really excited about the future of Live Chat in general. If you haven’t yet, you should download the program and give it a try.

A new version of ActiveCampaign Live Chat Software, version 1.34, has been released today. Along with many other changes, a good deal of memory optimizations have been committed that should lessen the load on your web server. With Live Chat’s Desktop application maturing as well, it’s a good time to upgrade to the latest version.

Live Chat Desktop Beta 1 is now available for download. Existing Live Chat clients can download the desktop beta by clicking here.

A number of clients have asked if we will follow others and make the desktop application a paid add-on. Our simple answer is no. Live Chat desktop will be freely available for any Live Chat client.

While this download has been marked as a beta product, we have been internally using Live Chat Desktop for some time and have worked out the major quirks ahead of time for our beta testers.

Here are some screenshots…

One of the projects we’re working on at the office is a desktop version of Live Chat’s operator console. Those who use Live Chat are likely to use it extensively (certainly we use it extensively), so having a dedicated desktop version of the operator console makes a lot of sense.

One thing about the standalone version of Live Chat is that it’s much more responsive. Using Live Chat over the web, while nice and especially handy for those mobile users of the service, one still needs a browser
– and all of the memory and processing overhead that comes with one.

We’re already a good portion of the way there with the Desktop version — over halfway finished. We’ve just implemented the typing indicator and typing preview features of the web console. Sending files is also
supported. It’s actually a lot of fun working on the desktop application, since — because we do use AJAX heavily in Live Chat — a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done on the backend in PHP.

Sample Screenshots:

Once our beta testing of the Live Chat Desktop application is finished, we’ll be looking at the full integration of other products into the Desktop suite. So stay tuned — I think Live Chat Desktop is going to be a good one.

New product lines mean additional opportunities to generate revenue through our affiliate program. Our latest product solution was heavily anticipated before it was released. It was heavily sought after by our existing clients even before the product was announced. Not only is it an exciting stand alone product, it integrates well with one of our existing products. With this in mind we present Live Chat to our affiliate members. ActiveCampaign Live Chat is a powerful web based live help solution that offers real-time messaging for sales, support, or internal communication. It allows you to increase productivity and customer satisfaction by providing immediate online assistance.
We would like our affiliates to be aware that we recently released Live Chat, a live chat application that promises to be an exciting addition to our product line. As an affiliate you have the opportunity to market a product that was heavily anticipated by many of our clients even before development plans were formally announced. Previously, live chat existed in some form or another on our company site in order to drive sales. We believe that live chat presents an ideal sales model for online retail looking for additional streams of revenue through converting existing site traffic into product purchases. Before purchasing a product at a retail store you are more likely to purchase a product if a sales representative is on hand to answer your questions, assuring you of the reliability of the product. Imagine walking into a deserted retail store with nobody available to assist you. You are more then twice as likely to leave that store in order to browse a similar outfit. This is the unfortunate experience of many site visitors that visit online retail stores. Live chat keeps site visitors on your page so they can ask more questions and this gives you the opportunity to personally present the product to them. They are then more than twice as likely to purchase your product before they stop browsing your site.As with any application that is used for instant messaging, Live Chat is not limited to sales conversions. Look for additional integration with our existing help desk software, Help Desk. Live chat is an application that was heavily coveted by many of our Help Desk clients. When Live Chat is installed in the same database as Help Desk you are able to use Help Desk’s departments and users. The addition of a live chat application, together with KnowledgeBuilder, our powerful knowledgebase solution, also available as a stand alone product, round out this powerful help desk solution. Another feature that should not be overlooked, Live Chat offers operator to operator chat for internal communication. You can access generated links for Live Chat through logging into your affiliate account.

ActiveCampaign Live Chat Software ( a powerful web based live help solution that offers real-time messaging for sales, support, or internal communication ) was released as 1.0 Stable recently. There are a number of great features included with the initial release of Live Chat. To glance through all of the available options I would suggest to go through our tour of live chat features.

We have had a positive response to Live Chat and the Help Desk/Live Chat integration. Plans are already underway to increase the integration between the two products and extend Live Chat further.

Pricing for Live Chat has been discounted for a limited time as part of the introduction of TrioLive. Order now to receive the special pricing.