The customer experience of webchat

Working through a complex web site can be a painful experience as you try to navigate through pages and understand tabs with varying degrees of guidance. The availability of web chat on sites has increased allowing some human interaction to your online journey. Webchat presents itself as a reactive tool to awaiting you to click through to some interactive text chat with a willing operator. Proactive web chat hovers in the background waiting to pounce on you when you look lost or close to leaving a purchase process kicking in a communication channel to keep you online. Both are delivering multi-channel experiences and building on the digital customer flavour. Webchat doesn't end with mere web site integration through as companies need to consider how this impacts on operations and hooks into other information sources to give a joined up experience. Mistakes can be made in simply bolting on an external webchat provider to a website without considering these dimensions. Lots of opportunity for an epic fail.