January 27th, 2009
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.
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January 21st, 2009
First of all, let me congratulate you on finally taking office. I’m sure you are relishing the sound of “Mr. President” without that pesky “Elect” modifier. Look out for the “Hail to the Chief” song though – that’s going to get annoying, but quick.
Everyone knows that you’re addicted to your BlackBerry and we totally get it. Staying in ‘real-time’ touch is important and we support you whole-heartedly. Heck, it’s what we do over here at BoldChat.
I understand that the Secret Service is concerned about your desire to stay connected and I’ve been thinking that we might be able to help you out. You see, our hosted live chat solution is secured away in a tier-one datacenter which would mean all you’d need is a computer with an internet connection. The Secret Service can’t have a problem with that, can they?
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January 13th, 2009
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.
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January 8th, 2009
I remember attending a Ken Blanchard seminar a few years ago in which he equated focusing solely on features and benefits as the sound of a honking duck. “Quack, quack, quack” he would intone loudly to make sure we understood the potential irrelevance of spouting features and benefits. His point was that although the features were very interesting to you, they would be less interesting than the benefits to your customer and perhaps neither would be interesting at all. What mattered was making a real connection.
Chat gives you the capability to move from your visitor from reading static web pages of features and benefits into a conversation between two people. Engaging them in a chat can be key to take them from visitor to prospect to customer.
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January 8th, 2009
Ah, the webinar – a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Seriously, you can attend a webinar and eat cake at the same time. In the “olden-days”, during actual in-person seminars, it would have been considered quite rude to scoff down cake whilst a pundit shared his or her insights. But now, nobody is the wiser.
One of my favorite activities is to join a webinar during the lunch hour. Not only does it transform downtime into useful time, but I can ask questions with my mouth full. And there’s another reason too; good webinars can provide valuable information that you can put to work right away.
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January 6th, 2009
If someone gave you a hammer and said, “Build a house,” you could probably get it done. It wouldn’t be efficient, it would take longer and cost more, and you are likely to only discover issues that can’t be fixed quickly with just a hammer. But if the only tool you knew was a hammer, you might not even know how to start finding a better tool. What options exist? Where do I look? What are they called?
Your email situation in this metaphor is the house, and Microsoft Outlook is the hammer, and solving the problem is tough because there is no standard name for products like BoldMail that help you manage email in a team environment far more effectively.
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