When we talk to prospects, its sometimes difficult to understand why they would want to host their own live chat solution. There are two trade offs that should be measured: solution sophistication and control.

Vendors who provide implementations you can install yourself will be tempted to reduce the sophistication of the product they offer you OR you will be faced with a maintenance contract to make sure you pay for the support you will need. Finding the razor’s edge will be tricky. Full-featured installable solutions are simply more expensive. With a hosted solution, one simply focuses on what level of sophistication of the solution you wish to implement on your site.

Sure, DIY’ers get control (or more accurately, the feeling of control) when they bring a live chat solution in house, but with it comes the responsibility that a hosted live chat vendor takes on every day. Hosted live chat providers can typically be found in high availability hosting centers, typically on-net with SAS-70 certifications. They staff their teams with database, infrastructure and security specialists to make sure the performance of the solutions is fast, available, and safe. If the solution goes down, they take the call in the middle of the night.

When you do-it-yourself, you may be tempted to cut some corners – especially the costly ones. Discarded are SAS-70, hot spares, network analysis, negotiated bandwidth, vendor certifications, and specialty knowledge in favor of control and potentially saving a few dollars.

We suggest to prospects that they ask themselves this question, is hosting a live chat solution core to your business’s survival in these times? Isn’t your time better spent honing your website, improving SEO, tweaking your SEM, evaluating and enhancing your product line, and training your staff to be effective using live chat rather than paying your IT person to implement and support it?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Live Chat, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.