Apologies in advance for the long post. I need all of your opinion of feedback on this. I know us as business people can sometimes have rose tinted views on some things. If I am wrong about something, then I would like to know. If I am not seeing the obvious problems then again I would like to know.
Over the years I have had a number of websites, mainly in the service business, at one time I was managing probably about 12 or so sites of my own. And the service businesses have always made money in one way or another. Nothing to shout about, but comfortable. And I found that little things answering telephones and emails promptly have always helped. You would be shocked at the number of times someone has said to me that we are using your service because your office actually answered the phone. As simple as that sounds. We also found that have Live Chat on our website nearly always helped increas sales. People felt ib control, there was no telephone ques or waiting around. Providing live chat meant that someone always had to be logged into chat.
No, I thought, good or bad, if I had set up a call centre of chat agents dedicated to answering live chats on behalf of other businesses, it may be a good thing. Provided that the service quality was to a high standard, at a reasonable cost, then many businesses would consider paying for such a service. Especially businesses that were mainly operating online.
Now, I looked at all my competition, and I wanted to create a better name, better site, and do things they maybe were not doing so well. For example, most competitors don’t publish their prices. Little things like that. We do.
Anyway, I created chatbee dot co dot uk a managed live chat service. We are operating 24/7 and mainly targeting 3 countries UK/US/Australia. We could be doing a lot better in my opinion. I have also noticed a number of competitors operating in this area fold. Now, I just want to know, would you use such a service. If many businesses use telephone answering companies from time to time, why not live chat? I know I have used telephone answering companies very effectively when it got too busy, or out of office hours. It was a great service to have – and so much cheaper then hiring someone to answer calls. Telephone answering companies have done very well – I know many of them.
The online market place is huge. I thought/think even if we managed to get a tiny proportion of that we would do well.
I don’t know what it is? Are we too expensive? Paying just 79p per chat for 24/7 365 agents is not expensive in my opinion. If you are small business that may just do 10 chats in a day, then it’s dirt cheap, compared to you doing it yourself or even hiring someone one minimum wage.
Is the website rubbish? Even if we said the website was rubbish, I see our competitors with far worse websites. I may be biased, but compared to some of our competitor websites ours is good. And even if we said it’s not to everyone’s taste, it’s something that can be changed.
I am not exactly sure what it is.
However, the reality is it has not gone as well as I had hoped.
I have to be honest about one thing. I have also given it very little time, compared to the amount of time I had invested in other businesses I have started. However, this is the first business that I have had to put my hand up and say I am not so sure. I don’t believe in letting pride get in the way. If something is not going to work, I would rather put my hand up and say, I tried but I failed or it did not work.
Anyway, please let me know your thoughts.