Six reasons to use Live Chat for support

The spell is broken, the honeymoon is over. After a year of my raving about Westhost's support, the transition to the IT Skeptic's new server was not as smooth as advertised. They're fallable after all.

Hopefully not too many of you noticed but for 12 hours there you needed to speak Italian and be interested in Joomla (pah! Joomla is pretty but Drupal is the business). The DNS mixup is now fixed, the server is up, and we have 3GB RAM pretty much to ourselves, for now anyway. Two Hills has plans for it of which the IT Skeptic will play a part. More of that in coming weeks.

One excellent facility WestHost use is live chat. I've seen clients implement it often enough but never been a consumer of it before. It's great.

  • You get the experience of interacting with a live human
  • No spawn-of-the-devil "press 7 for someone who cares" phone systems
  • The operator can leave you on hold for a few minutes, and it is much less irritating than on a voice connection
  • The operator can interleave a chat discussion with other tasks. I suspect live chat is more efficient than phone support
  • I believe information exchange is better than over the phone: people think more about what they say and organise it a bit more
  • Both parties get a written record of what was said

WestHost really do have a very high standard of support - I'm not sure slacker organisations could cope with live chat. But for those who have their act together I can't speak highly enough of it as a support channel.

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