As they say, “customer service” is not a department, it’s an attitude. I can’t agree more, but still, it’s a service that any business should do right.

Businesses, whether entirely online, offline, or a mixture of both, should have a professionally established customer service department that will address customers’ concerns promptly and politely. In the case of online businesses, the website itself could prove to be an indispensable customer service platform.

Sure, most businesses online swear by the link “Contact Us” all the time. However, many customers doing purchases or taking advantage of services online, most certainly love to get the answers to their questions and solutions to their problems in an expedited manner.

Accuracy and speed count for online customers, because let’s face it, we all have tried to contact a site’s customer service department in one way or another only to have our concerns addressed in the next 24 hours. If the answers to our questions were not as satisfactory as we hoped, we would have to turn in again a follow up inquiry only to wait for another 24 hours to get hopefully the right answers to our questions.

Fortunately, with the right tools, you can provide real-time solutions to customers who live in the “now”, those who need the answers to their questions right this instant. With a good live chat widget, you can instantly set up a good customer service platform onsite.

One of today’s most innovative chatting tools is ChatWing.com’s onsite live chat widget. It’s so simple and so easy to set up that implementing one online is like setting up a social media profile.

To make this strategy more effective, you could get someone within your business to look after the chatting tool and to provide quick and accurate solutions to your customers’ needs.

For more information on how you can implement ChatWing’s live chat widget on your site to have your very own customer service tool onsite, visit ChatWing.com today.

As with everything else, as far as integrating a utility into a website is concerned, there are certain questions to ask to see whether doing such is viable or useful.

 

So, let’s get right down to some of the questions that we should look into when integrating a live chat widget within any website.

Question no. 1: Is it useful?

This question is probably the most fundamental of them all. If a live chat tool has no real use for your website, then apparently there is no point in allocating a precious portion of your online real estate which you could use for something else. If your site is a forum for Internet marketing, for example, you may or may not use a chat widget. It could be pointless in this case as everyone is communicating anyway, albeit not as real-time as with a chatting tool.

In the next question, we’ll see the level of usefulness an onsite live chat tool could offer your site depending on which area your site needs improvement.

Question no. 2: Should your site use it?

If you are running a static website, whatever the niche is, and you think your site could improve in terms of visibility, traffic and bounce rate.

Question no. 3: What do you think is the real benefit of this utility to your site?

Look at your site’s analytics. If your site has a bounce rate of updwards 60%, chances are, good old Google will slap you for being not relevant to your visitors. Search engine spiders will somehow see your site as being stuffed with keywords to make it appear relevant to users. But you can’t fool them, as your bounce rate, or the rate of people visiting and then leaving within the first few seconds.

So how can a live chat widget help improve your site’s bounce rate? With a live chat tool onsite, people will want to stay on your site some more as they engage with other visitors in real-time and talk about topics relating to the site.

Find out today how ChatWing.com can help improve your site’s bounce rate and overall interactive experience.

There’s no denying the fact that onsite live chat widgets provide businesses with great online solutions in terms of changing the way they interact with customers online as well as the way the provide a whole new interactive experience to their site’s visitors.

But businesses should be wary about doing things haphazardly online. By that I mean they should keep in mind that any tool that allows them to interact with their visitors should be looked after with high regard for professionalism.

Communicating with customers online is no different than communicating with them offline, or in the real world. For some, an online chatting tool dehumanizes the way we communicate, which actually begs the question, if there’s no other way to conveniently communicate, how else can we send our message across?

Whether humanizing or dehumanizing, there’s no excuse not to be professional when dealing with visitors on your site.

When implementing a live chat widget onsite, remember the following etiquettes for a better interactive experience for your site’s visitors.

Use appropriate avatars

Avatars represent who we are online. Carefully choose which avatar to use, one that does not offend visitors and one that projects a friendly image, an image that somehow tells your visitors one thing or two about what you can do for them.

Properly introducing yourself

Very much like in the real world, it is essential to properly introduce yourself whenever talking to a customer or responding to a visitor’s inquiry online. Briefly tell the person who you are and what you do. Also, it would be best to always address the other person using his name or screen name. Whichever the person is using, nothing would make his day better than having someone acknowledge him among the crowd.

Using polite words

A simple “Thank you for asking” or “Thanks for taking interest” would go a long way and would say a lot about your service’s credibility.

As far as avoiding miscommunication is concerned, always use precise, direct to the point words. Don’t garnish your statements with too much words. Also, when dealing with international customers, when they can’t seem to express their thoughts properly in English, it would help to paraphrase what they just said. Paraphrasing would make the other person feel you are really paying attention as you are trying to make sure that both of you are on the same page.

Remember, the Internet is merely a communication tool that stands between you and the other person. So always be sure to properly project a professional and friendly image online for your customers.

The adult segment of the consumer market commands a respectable piece of the pie chart and it is a significant part of the demographics to reckon with. In 2008 alone, nearly 80 percent of adults in the States bought something on the Internet.

Now, that’s not a paltry number to ignore.

But what do online chat rooms for adults have to do with all this? As a powerful communication tool, onsite chat widgets can help engage your site’s adult consumers even more and laser target those in other sites.

Live chat widgets do make sites more interactive with an incredible real-time element, no doubt about that, but how will your site get found by other adults?

Imagine a tool, outside social media, that links all related sites, say, something that the adult segment of the consumers can relate to, like health care sites. There are tons of health care sites out there, and some of these are doing well in terms of traffic, and some merely scrape by.

Enter ChatWing.com. Let’s say all the sites above decided to use ChatWing’s live chat widget. These sites will not only enjoy the benefits of having a real-time tool. One of ChatWing’s greatest features lies in its unique networking technology that links related sites together, offering related sites, such as health-related sites, an opportunity to be found by users of other related sites.

To find out more about how ChatWing works, visit ChatWing.com today.

 

Chat rooms, whether stand alone or widgets, are mostly free and open to everyone. In the early days (by that I mean more than a decade ago), when chat rooms were all the craze and when social networking sites were just a figment of the mind, I was one of those chat room rats.

Being a dad myself, and since it seems that chat rooms are here to stay, I am beginning to wonder how chat rooms will play a role in my children’s lives. I realize that they may not be able to entirely avoid getting in some sort of chat rooms as they grow through their teens, but the concern about all this is that just how immersed would they get? With all the proposals to make the Internet a safer and better “place” to socialize in, what’s the guarantee that I can leave my kids all alone with strangers in some chat rooms that I may not know about?

Perhaps the best approach to curb the hidden dangers of chat rooms is for parents and kids to have an open communication about what sort of dangers are lurking in chat sites, how to avoid them and which information are not supposed to be shared with strangers.

Some of the dangers that could kid could potentially encounter in chat sites are cyber bullying and sexual harassments. These can be avoided if parents and kids can agree to which chat rooms they are allowed to visit and kids should disclose who among their friends are they chatting with.

Kids must be instructed to never disclose information such as email address, home address, phone numbers and never ever to share photos with people they don’t know.

By working hand in hand with kids and by having a truly open communication with them, we can be rest assured that our kids could stay out of harm’s way online.