Customer service should be a strategy that positively impacts and feeds into your overall strategic plan. Learn to take it to the next level at the International Customer Service Association Conference, September 19-22, 2010 at the Omni Hotel at the CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia. You have until July 31 to take advantage of early bird pricing and find out about “The Power of Service.”

While you’re at ICSA, be sure to catch Rick Trefzger, COO of IS3/STOPzilla and Steve Castro-Miller, CEO of Bold Software as they present “CHATzilla: Live Chat’s Power over the Support Beast – A Success Story from iS3″ on September 20, at 10:30 a.m.

During this presentation you’ll understand how iS3, makers of STOPzilla, differentiated themselves in the fast-paced battle to stay ahead of malicious spyware programmers while their front line support personnel faced intense, day-to-day demands. Within this hyper-competitive market, iS3 had to differentiate themselves by providing a superior customer experience. Live chat has powered-up the company’s care organization while simultaneously reducing costs. In just 45 days the company was delighting thousands of customers a week by responding in real time to support issues via the live chat channel. After this case study, bolstered by leading industry research, you’ll be ready to determine if live chat is a good solution for your company and what steps are required to provide it and start delivering great service.

We’ve recently made some changes to our corporate branding, product naming, and available features that we’d like to share with both our existing and prospective customers.  Before we jump in to the individual changes, it will be helpful to explain why we made them in the first place.  There are several reasons, though two come to the fore.

First, despite the economy that surrounds us, we’re growing.  And, as we continue to grow, continue to win business from large preeminent brands, and continue to be relied on by media and analysts as experts in our field, we needed to establish a corporate presence beyond the brand names of the products we sell. Though many know us as “BoldChat”, that is simply one of the brands we manage.

Secondly, our growth has been fueled by two types of customers – small to mid-sized entrepreneurial businesses and significant enterprise engagements.  As such, the feature sets each of these customers require has changed over time.  We needed to react and build offerings appropriate for each.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve struggled with this post because there are so many ways in which learnings from live chat can impact a business that it was hard to know where to start. Perhaps you can identify with my conundrum if the question were re-worded. “Can I improve my business by talking to my customers and prospective customers?”

You see my point – it’s about as wide open as the Atlantic. In the interest of brevity, and as a way to organize things, I’m going to talk about 3 distinct ways in which live chat interactions can drive improvement in organizations. There’s at least ten times that many, but “3 ways that live chat can impact your bottom line” is as pithy as it is relevant.

Read the rest of this entry »

Under tight economic conditions, why would any company give up business to their competitors? There are several perfectly rational (and economically sound) reasons. Here are a few:

1. If your product can be used a particular way, but really shouldn’t be. Our BoldMail solution is extremely powerful and our customers use it with tangible benefits to their business. However, it is a tool intended for the management of inbound emails. We turn away prospects who want to use it as an outbound email marketing solution. It can be used this way, but because it wasn’t designed to be, it would ultimately fail to satisfy them. To see how BoldMail works, check out this short video.
   Read the rest of this entry »

This 11-word question has a 1-word answer – data.

Management-types have a strange affinity for numbers. Raw data makes them smile, spreadsheets can warm their hearts, and graphs make them downright giddy. It is said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well, the way to management’s top-of-mind is through data.

Sort of.

In today’s world, we all have access to piles of statistics about our websites. We know about time-on-page, bounce rates, and conversions by keyword. We know about geo-IP, referring URLs and other sophisticated visitor monitoring information. Emailing daily reams of data to management with may seem like a good idea, but 

is likely to get you nowhere fast. Yes, management likes data. But what really gets them excited is data-driven analysis.

Read the rest of this entry »

There might be a temptation to run some reports on your live chat implementation and hand those out, showing who has had the most conversions, who types the fastest, who took the most chats, etc. But quantity of interaction is only one of the benefits you can garner from using live chat.

You probably ignore that voice that says “calls may be recorded for quality purposes” – that’s because call centers have been working on quality for years. Live chat should be no different.

Creating a Chat Quality Assurance program isn’t hard or overly time-consuming. I’ve done it several times over the years. Done well, it not only improves the quality of your interactions with your customers, it can give you a chance to salute your high performers and use incentive systems to boost morale. It’s a win, win, win.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.”  And with economic downturns, companies face that necessity and are driven to improve efficiency and reduce costs (hopefully without sacrificing their brands in the process.)

With that in mind, here are 5 technologies that may be helpful for your business in a tight economy:

5. Pitchengine:  Pitchengine is a great way to publish your own press releases, for free, and have them indexed by search engines quickly. PR is valuable, but can be expensive and Pitchengine provides an inexpensive option for self-managed PR.  If you have to make cuts to your PR budget, Pitchengine can help you keep PR alive during the downturn.

Read the rest of this entry »