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This week’s Live Chat space was filled with news about innovative Live Chat solutions and enhancements to improve customer service and ultimately help businesses increase sales.

Kicking off the week, the e-tailing group, an e-commerce consultancy delivers high-level customer experience across its channels, and BoldChat, a live chat offering that enables businesses to efficiently engage visitors on their websites to improve online support, have released Live Chat Effectiveness findings where 90 percent of participants said they want Live Chat universally available on a website. The report entitled “Chat with the Chatters: Why Consumers Choose to Chat with Retailers” provides insight into the reasons why consumers prefer Live Chat over any other form of communication with retailers.

The piece found that Live Chat makes shoppers feel special and empowered, allowing them to multitask, gives shoppers instant gratification, addresses simple to complex issues, customers avoid touch-points with live chat, and Live Chat is “good old fashioned customer service.”

All in all, when communicating with a retailer, consumers want to be treated like an intelligent person in search of a solution, and prefer a live chat situation where they can get in and out quickly.

In other Live Chat news, Virgin Atlantic, a company offering airline passenger service, has recently deployed LivePerson Chat solution to improve customer experience with real-time proactive chat.

Virgin Atlantic officials said that they have implemented the LP Chat to enable customers to have their questions answered in real time online, as well as saving them from e-mailing or calling, and to improve online ticket sales conversion rates and catch website visitors who were dropping off before completing the booking process.

"LP Chat has become a core feature of our customer service program, particularly in crisis situations, allowing us to reach a large number of customers with personalized support," said John Giddings, general manager, Virgin Atlantic Contact Centers US and UK. "The results we've experienced with LP Chat in terms of conversions have exceeded expectations so much so that we plan to increase the number of agents available via live chat to best service our customers."

Lastly, BoldChat recently hosted a webinar discussing five ways to engage website visitors. On the list was managing a Twitter stream to “find conversation opportunities.” Twitter (News - Alert) (News - Alert) has changed a bit since it came into the social media landscape and users are taking to the platform to reach out to businesses for customer support. Businesses can use surfing Twitter streams to engage with their customer base instead of just waiting for problems to occur.

Since customer service is a crucial part of business, staying on top of the latest technologies is important to customer relationship success. As businesses realize the importance of social customer interaction, finding tools to integrate into their existing CRM software is important to stay with the times.

BoldChat, in addition to their live chat solutions, is currently in Beta with a Twitter Management service that allows reps to manage Twitter conversations and maximize agent efficiency. With the new tool, Twitter conversations can be routed to a specific agent, assigned as needed, while private messages can be managed through the BoldChat interface.

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