Selling on websites for many kinds of businesses is much tougher than it first appears. I know this from affiliate marketing. It’s difficult to get new visitors to purchase. One of the biggest reasons is actually that much of such online purchasing happens without human contact taking place, whether it is on eBay or Amazon or any of dozens of other websites.

Somehow, newer shoppers need the hand holding or reassurance that goes with human contact. Online this is often difficult to replicate exactly, but the online world does offer its own equivalents, through forums, email, im, and so on.

Recently, onsite live chat with sales or support has created an extra opportunity to reach out to customers and convert even more of those visitors. Naturally, getting the chance to review this service intrigued me when LiveHuman Chat started promoting their services. LiveHuman Chat offers support chat services for online companies that are needing that little extra on their website to boost sales and provide better customer support.

You’ve probably tried out Live Chat services on some websites, such as hosting companies, and more progressive smaller and medium sized companies, though I have yet to see it on some of the larger companies. I have also used it on several occasions and found it efficient and quick to get the information I wanted, and I was able to make a much more informed decision.

What is LiveHuman?

LiveHuman is simply an online chatting service that can be configured easily and quickly on the client’s site to provide support and pre-/after-sales care for your customers. As the entire service is hosted elsewhere, you only need a line of HTML code pasted into the code of your website. From that, the entire service is made available without extensive technological skills.

You are looking at the IM window image, taken from the company’s own website. Its appearance is quite reminiscent of IM interfaces, so users will already be familiar with the functions and capabilities. There shouldn’t be much of a learning curve for them on this at all.

Installation, Management and Benefits

On the owner’s site, the information is logged and and monitored with records being easily available as well enabling support and sales staff to go back and check discussions.

For small businesses that could make the best use of this, the pricing is affordable though of course you will have to factor into this the cost of hiring support staff (part-time or full-time) as well.

The capabilities and benefits of such a system on your website:

1. increasing your sales because someone can answer questions and interact with potential customers (who won’t then go off and seek less reliable information on bulletin boards and forums elsewhere);
2. existing customers will be able to get immediate help instead of relying on emails or more traditional ticket-based support systems;
3. and the additional ease of installation won’t impact your own technical department unduly as you won’t have extra servers to maintain or websites and applications to debug or test.

It’s difficult to imagine this not being useful or affordable for an SME. In fact, for the really enterprising, the system could be expanded to deal with not just clients or customers, but also employees, student queries, and anywhere where speedy, accurate and online help can benefit significantly large groups of people. Why stop at just sales?