Is your sales chat losing customers?

Most of the websites today have the the pre-sales chat options on their site. These chats usually do not assure you about the quality of the product/service you are going to receive but still if the sales person can convince you to buy the product and can answer all the questions you may have about the product/service, I would say that they are giving good ROI.

But what if you have a bad (read horrible) experience during the pre-sales chat? Would you still pay for the product, no matter how good you have heard about it?

Live Chat

Live Sales Chat

I was recently looking for a change in web hosts. Although I have no problem with my present host, HostGator, I just wanted to cut the cost of hosting a little (I was on a Business plan which costs 15$ a month). But believe me, if you can afford, you won’t get a better shared hosting service in the industry. I went through a lot of reviews and narrowed down my search to two hosts, DreamHost and Bluehost. Both were priced around 7-9 $ a month, offered 99.9% uptime, unlimited disk/bandwidth, etc, etc and were good for me. I still had a couple of questions about their server configuration, so I jumped on their website and clicked the button which said “Live chat”.

I started with Dreamhost, asked the guy(or girl) if he would be able to answer a few technical questions and then asked him a couple like the memory limit, cURL support, image library (GD or ImageMagick), etc and he wasn’t able to answer one of them. Only after I showed discomfort on his lack of knowledge about the product the company was selling, he did some search for the answers. The answers were satisfactory and were upto my hosting needs. But overall, it was a very bad experience and took 44  minutes to get answers to a few basic questions (not more than 5). I was seriously turned off and stroked DreamHost off the list. I may have over-reacted but how can I trust a company who can’t even train their sales people about the products/services they are offering?

I turned to Bluehost’s sales person, and asked if she would be able to answer a few technical questions. She wasn’t sure if she can but still asked me to fire those questions. I was amazed to see the thoroughness of the responses and all I could say at the end was “I guess, I would be soon associated with Bluehost“. JFYI, I asked the same set of questions and it took less than 10 minutes for the whole chat. Within minutes, I signed up for a 2 year contract on Bluehost.

All I want to say is that if you decide to provide the option of live sales chat on your site, make sure you are offering nothing but the best. A customer creates an impression about the whole company from this chat and you don’t want to spoil it if you are offering the best services in the industry. Do Not Lose Customers, at least not from your sales chat!!

2 thoughts on “Is your sales chat losing customers?

  1. IceCreamYou

    I like BlueHost a lot. I’ve had good experiences with them and particularly with their customer service. They even helped me figure out some things on a client’s GoDaddy account that I was trying to migrate after I couldn’t get a hold of GoDaddy support. And I’ve heard similar things about DreamHost in the past.

    Reply

Leave a Reply