The days of 'I just want to talk to someone' are rapidly disappearing and being replaced with 'the last thing I want to do is have to talk to someone'. This is especially relevant in the part of the process that the internet dominates, which is self-service research, education, comparison and selection.
However, chat only works when the response is timely. As a startup, with only a handful of people, we faced the concern of 'How do I ensure a timely response to users on our site?'
Ryan and I both decided pre-beta that we shouldn't offer chat as we couldn't reliably provide this to our users and what if there were hundreds of people asking for help!? then what?!
Going into Beta
In the interest of learning from those who we work with we reached out to Evan Hamilton over at UserVoice. These are the guys who provide the little side bar that helps capture feedback and support issues from our users generally so who better to have a talk to about preparing for conversations with our users.
We got to the 'what about chat' question and Evan's response was pretty compelling: "Beta is the time when you want to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible."
In essence, these are conversations you will want to be having and don't worry about being overloaded with users. Too many people on your site all wanting to talk to you, major 'happy problem.'
Evan couldn't have been more correct!
What we did
We launched beta with Olark.
With a freemium business model meant we could get started for no initial outlay. Like a lot of add-ons (including UserVoice and Kissmetrics) it is implemented with some fairly basic javascript wherever you want the client to appear. You hook it up to your local messaging client. We're on Macs so we just used iChat. Not the loveliest of chat clients (iChat that is!) but it works.
Here's what it looks like for the user:
What did we find?
First, the chat client is our first alert about people even being on the site. It's a real time monitor of traffic if you like. In a period where we are focused on getting users to the site and having them use Planwise it's been great to see people on the site as they appear.
On the morning we got the Sprouter feature the chat client was aliiiive with users. It was the most exciting moment in our short history to date :)
But the conversations we got to have as a result were even more valuable. In the few short weeks since we've started to see real traction. We talked to:
- people with amazing feedback & ideas
- people who we are now talking to about distribution
- people who are highly qualified and potential investors
- people who would have otherwise not let us know about bugs and issues
I've had 2 offline meetings that resulted directly from having chat and not one time feeling like we werent able to support the users.
In the end...
In the end it makes complete sense. As a user I like the immediacy of chat and the ability to be personal without having to stop everything else I'm doing (I've got 4 chat windows open while writing this!). We are at point now where we have to ask ourselves not would we turn it on ... but why would we turn it off?
Thanks again, Evan, for the great advice!