Technology Trends 2012- Live Chat

I have been in customer service technology now for about 10 years and there are only a few technologies that I can remember having such a meteoric rise as Live Chat has seen in the last 18 months. So many technologies in CS come and go, but few really have the juice to break through and become that next "Must Have" tool that everyone is budgeting for and deploying. Cloud Routing from Genesys and GeoTel was one, Quality Monitoring and WFM were another. Recently voice analytics picked up steam and filled this position. And now it seems like as all those technologies mature and start to pick off the last remaining laggards, Live Chat has taken the mantle and assumed the position of the "Must Have" new technology.

For years, live chat has been around. I can remember working with some more voice related companies like Nortel, Avaya and Cisco and how they were packaging the Multi Channel approach to customers and as a part of that was live chat. But over the last 5 years, it seemed like Live Chat just lingered in the background without any significant energy to break away from just the few early adopters.

But wow, what a difference the last few years have made. Everybody and their brother seems to be either fully deployed, in the midst of deploying or going out to RFP to put in Live Chat. And it is not just CS that is pushing this initiative. I am seeing a huge ground swell of activity in the Sales side of the business, sales leadership demanding that they need to have Live Chat to support customers immediately from the website. So there has been a flood of vendors into the market space, from very large to very small and from stand alone unique solutions to packaged apps from the big software vendors. Just a few that are really eating up the market right now are Moxie Software, LivePerson, Oracle (through numerous acquistions), RightNow (now Oracle), Bold Chat and Whos On.

They all have their pluses and minuses, just like any technology out there. I have heard some companies say that it has been a wasted investment. I have heard the majority of others say that it was a great investment. The ones that say that it worked for them, are the same companies that get any new technology investment right. They are the ones that figure out why they want it, understand what it will do for them, design a set of requirements that hit on a specific use case and then limit the first project to a mission that is focused and quantifiable. The ones that complain that Live Chat was "oversold" to them, are the same ones that complain every time because they did not put in the effort to make it successful and just hoped that the technology would have all the answers.