11–20 of 235 posts
Having a human talk to you thru your screen is a game changer in e-commerce. I personally use amazon customer support chat myself very often.
Eh, in my experience, I generally disagree. Why wait for an email response when you can get an answer then and there? Also, outside of online retail shopping, I've found live chat very useful. Sure, get rid of the intrusive popups and chatbots which don't help. But keep the live chat. It's valuable to the customer.
How can I tell whether it's a human I'll be talking to or a bot? I've had enough of my time wasted that I'm no longer prepared to bother.
Eh, in my experience, I generally disagree. Why wait for an email response when you can get an answer then and there? Also, outside of online retail shopping, I've found live chat very useful. Sure, get rid of the intrusive popups and chatbots which don't help. But keep the live chat. It's valuable to the customer.
If the live chat service connects me to a human who is able to resolve my query in a timely manner, I'll take that any day.
Phoning a large company can result in waiting in a call queue for a long time. My attention is on the phone call instead of anything else. A live chat window can be relatively ignored and checked once in a while.
Emailing a large company can result in waiting for a reply taking 3-5 business years. Live chat gets me a response relatively quickly.
A live chat service that does not provide an easy means of interacting with a human and which instead easily allows getting stuck in a bot loop is a great example of poor customer service and, for me, a great way of quickly finding out who to not do business with.
That said, a poor live chat service for a business that I absolutely have to contact (most recently when terminating internet service after moving house) is an exercise in frustration and annoyance that is hard to replicate in any other manner.
It could be nice to use a gpt-3 chat trained with the info from the web to have something like an ai search system.
Readers are commenting that chat increases "conversions" (I guess that means sales). I'd be interested to see what convincing but wrong chatbots do do conversions and to ongoing customer numbers.
In my experience, the usefulness of live chat features varies wildly. If the live chat service connects me to a human who is able to resolve my query in a timely manner, I'll take that any day. Phoning a large company can result in waiting in a call queue for a long time. My attention is on the phone call instead of anything else. A live chat window can be relatively ignored and checked once in a while. Emailing a la…
Being stuck in a loop against what's essentially a buggy ELIZA-Clone however, or a system that somehow is incapable of authenticating me even though I've logged into my account on their website, is not.