Online customer service is a must in today’s competitive ebusiness climate, and customer service is at its best when it happens in real time and is captured to your database. Live help customer service — whether it comes in the form of chat, instant messaging or voice — is a great customer-retention tool that keeps service center costs in check.

Live help solutions improve customer service for businesses of all sizes, whether you run a simple website or a large call center. An abundance of live help customer service software options are available — from simple add-ons to full-featured CRM and call center solutions — so small and large businesses can find an appropriate solution.


When shopping for live help customer service solutions, consider the following:

1. Live help customer service stand-alone applications.
2. Live chat support software in call center solutions.
3. Using a knowledge base to support online customer service.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Live chat customer service stand-alone solutions

Thanks to the popularity of instant messaging, today's customers are generally comfortable with live chat customer service. Many live chat support software products are designed as easy add-ons to existing websites. They range from simple pop-up chat windows to products with basic help desk features. At the very least, find live chat support software that manages trouble tickets and - even better - that captures customer information.

I recommend: With live chat, web and email-based ticket support along with a knowledge base, Omnistar Live comes in both hosted and nonhosted versions with price structures based on the number of users. ProvideSupport.com offers live chat customer service solutions optimized for different industries, including real estate, online pharmacies, car rental, financial, insurance and more. ZaZaChat’s complete help desk live chat software for e-businesses features trouble ticket management. WebsiteAlive and ParaChat also provide live chat customer service software.

Live help customer service in call center solutions

A full-featured call center solution integrates phones, email and chat with CTI, skill-based routing, IVR, monitoring and reporting, knowledge base, predictive dialer and much more. Enterprise-level online customer service software is designed to integrate with CRM and ERP solutions to become part of an enterprise's complete technology profile.

I recommend: Onyx Contact Center integrates with other Onxy products, including marketing automation, sales force automation, service/support automation, contact center, partner relationship management and customer process management. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise integrates inbound and outbound voice applications with Internet applications including real-time chat, allowing a single agent to handle multiple interactions simultaneously regardless of communication channel.

Using a knowledge base to support online customer service

Call center agents rely on reference material to respond to customer inquiries. Aggregating your product support information in a knowledge base that is integrated with live help customer service solutions allows your agents to respond quickly and knowledgably in live help situations, helping them open and close trouble tickets in a single encounter.

I recommend: Chat4Support live help solutions allow your representatives to send prepared solutions to the customer from your knowledge base, while saving chat sessions and reporting customer information and chat statistics. RightNow Technology’s RightNow Service is a multichannel (phone, web, email) service solution with an integrated self-learning knowledge repository. Its artificial intelligence technology creates and updates the knowledge base based on the questions your customers ask. The help desk software directory at Business.com lists knowledge management vendors that have help desk solutions.

Tips & Tactics

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  Consider a hosted call center solution in which the live help customer service software resides on the vendor's server.
• •  Choose live help solutions that support multiple channels of communication, including chat, voice and email.
• •  Choose online customer service solutions with reports and analytics to monitor and improve the effectiveness of your call center.
• •  All forms of online customer service should be supported with a knowledge base for effective response to customer inquires.
• •  Live chat support software allows call center agents to handle multiple customers simultaneously.