If you're a commercial company selling products or services to customers (either B2B or B2C), and the customer experience matters to you, having chat on your website is no longer an option, it's an expecatation.  In much the same way that you have a company email address and phone number, in a social world you also need to greet and respond to customers at your digital front door.

If you're embarking on a project to install website chat to hold live, web-based discussions with customers, let me help you understand what NOT to do.  Queue-based call center funnel chat (what I call "legacy chat") is only valuable if it helps your organization enable customers with new tools for communication AND you can improve your reaction time to customers.  If not, you may want to think about alternative ways to empower customers to get answers to their questions (maybe a company wiki or a community portal).

Marshall McLuhan is probably best known for postulating that “the medium is the message,” but his lesser known “hot” and “cool” media concept may prove even more prescient with the impending engagement economy that will be adopted by marketers and salespersons interested in making social media work in entirely new ways.

GUEST POST

More than ever before, customers are experiencing data overload.  I don’t just mean the volumes of informational and marketing messages confronting them, but the gross volume of data vying for their attention, both direct and subliminal. Have you acted like you’re listening to your spouse or significant other while the television is blaring in the background and you’re reading work emails on your mobile phone or tablet?  It’s madness! 

Customers are often referred to as “consumers” for a reason: they pay for consumption.  We buy and use things; it can be throwaway commodities, state-of-the-art electronics, or even ideas. We take resources and utilize them as-is, or blend and mold resources for new or more complex use cases. In the past consumption was driven by necessity, that same mother of invention.  Today however, consumption is primarily governed by a precept of kingly entitlement.

By: Harvey Mackay

In the prophetic words of Bob Dylan, “for the times they are a changin’”.  Right on Bob, right on!  The one constant is change.  And nowhere is this more the case than the way buyers are using the Internet.  2012 is ushering a new era where companies who don’t get customer engagement will be left to compete for the scraps.

I recently read an interesting post by Mike Loukides on (radar.oreilly.com) and the topic was something that I'm sure most people can't fathom: The end of social. The end of social? You've got to be joking! Social is everywhere! But that was exactly his point. The noise factor has increased so dramatically in our social feeds (think automated check-ins and what I'm listening to) that it is drowning out the very things that make social valuable. In other words, when you make sharing too easy the human connection is lost. He goes on to write:

To answer the question of what it means to be a human on the Internet, we first need to assume that online technology can provide a humanlike experience.  If we believe this to be true, then we need to define what type of humanlike experience online technology provides.  Many would support the idea that online technology provides a humanlike experience as a communication tool, yet misses many of the emotional quotient (EQ) characteristics of actually being human.

We've all used (or at least have seen) the nifty little buttons that can be added to our websites.  There are buttons for RSS feeds, buttons for Facebook Connect, the Google +1 button, and a myriad of other buttons that are designed to help our website visitors engage more deeply with our brand.

Well, Workface is proud to announce the first version of the Workface Status button.  It's small, but oh so powerful!  It's the closest thing to having a real meeting embedded right on your website.  This isn't just for your business, it's for you!  Now people can connect with you 1-to-1 based on your availability.

What Does It Do?
The Workface Status button alerts visitors to your website whether or not you're online.  If you're connected to the internet, it says, "Online! Chat now".  When a visitor clicks on it, they can go directly into live text, audio, or video chat communications with you.  It can easily be deployed for one person, or all the people in your company.  When you're no longer connected to the Internet, the button automatically changes to say, "Send a Message" and then your website visitor can drop you a message.  How cool is that? Real-time status.

What Does It Look Like?
Here's a real example.  When I'm connected to the Internet it will say "Online! Chat Now" and when I'm offline it says "Send a Message".