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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> I was SUPER skeptical about the chat widget. I personally found them annoying, overbearing and could not imagine them working for customer support or sales. > Boy was I wrong. As in completely, utterly, totally wrong.

I've found a chat widget really helpful for my own product (https://www.checkbot.io/) - I find the reduced lag of the chat format means problems get resolved quicker on both ends and the style of replying (e.g. maybe 16 short messages back and forth with chat via 4 longer ones with email) results in you getting more information and making more of a connection with your users.

I use the free tier of https://crisp.chat but most of them are fairly similar for basic usage. I would say avoid using one that has that annoying "Hey! You! How can I help?" automatic pop-up feature though.

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I'm a big fan of the team at Drift, as the product itself is very good- They just make it really easy to have their product be annoying which is why so many of us complain about that.

I will also say we use live chat extensively in our product and it's nothing but great. We have a sub 1 minute median response rate for all chat requests, and our customers love it. Great support matters, and chat is great support.

> We have a sub 1 minute median response rate for all chat requests, and our customers love it. Great support matters, and chat is great support.

When the person replying on chat is knowledgable and is able to reply quickly, it's a great support experience on both ends I think.

Automatic pop-ups, bots replying instead of humans and unhelpful support staff is what gives chat a bad reputation but when used right I think chat can be an order of magnitude improvement over email.

Email can be used badly as well - I find some large companies take several days to reply to support emails and have staff that mostly reply with templates triggered by a few words in your message instead of understanding what you're asking.

Great point on email being bad as well.

I've been going back and forth with Google on an oauth consent screen approval for 2.5 months now, all over email, with multi-week gaps between each response from them.

I'd give anything to just hop on a live chat with them an answer any questions they have.

SAME! I have a product that I'm trying to launch and everything works except that it needs OAuth consent approval. There is currently a bug in my Google console preventing me from completing the step that the most recent email said to do, and I've responded with that several times and it just feels like I'm shouting into the void.

I completely agree with using chat solutions such as Drift, but what is important to highlight here is that "With great power comes great responsibility!", meaning if out have chat solution in your product and want happy customers, you need to be there to serve them all the time. Making sure that response time is instant, and quality is not lacking. And that is something I found super challenging, since as a small company you are fighting different battles at the same time. Any thoughts on that topic?

My number one priority with support tickets and live chat requests is to have an initial response as quickly as possible. That initial response doesn’t need to be an answer to their question or a solution to their problem, but rather an acknowledgement that I’ve heard them and I’m on it.

In the event that I can’t fix their issue very quickly (minutes), I usually tell them I’ll follow up here and over email to let them know I’ve fixed the issue or addressed whatever they were raising. Because users of our product tend to have us open for a long period of times (companies use us for organization wide 360s), I usually can catch a person why they are still in the product.

As for juggling all the other things you’re working on as a startup, paying customers who have a question / issue almost always trumps every other thing I’m working on at any other moment. Outside of meeting with another customer, I will push whatever I’m doing and shift my attention accordingly.

I hate seeing the pop-up, but then I actually used it in Notion, which apparently has O(3) staff, and aome of my problems got solved, and the rest got allegedly added to backlog, and I entirely felt better than when I clicked the chat button in frustration.

I had the same experience. Personally, I loathe chat widgets, but installed one on our SaaS, and customers LOVE it. In fact, it was down for a day recently while we swapped support providers, and customers were actually emailing me asking where the chat widget was.

Even in that 24 hours, dealing with support via email was a distinctly crappy experience compared to a live chat widget.

To those who are thinking of using a chat a) Get enough resources so they can respond in timely manner. If you grow bigger,you probably want to cover 24/7. b) Have a strategy in place on how you shift the chat convo into a call(if it's sales enquiry) or how you finish it in timely manner so you don't turn it into a friendly,yet meaningless chat. c) Don't take someone's use case as an answer to your problems.There are many businesses,where chat isn't a good idea, don't adopt it blindly.

Same here. Sometimes a simple user question about my side project https://abot.app, converts into a sale. I am using http://crisp.chat/ as well.

Their great when the person on the other end replies promptly. But often, they take 10+ minutes to reply every time, which is extremely annoying.

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