Live chat needs to evolve

Live-chats are great, and they proved to be exactly the kind of solution websites require to do customer support and interaction with visitors. As a customer, I can’t think of a better way to initiate a conversation with a business, but oftentimes, I find myself writing too much text when I could simply be talking to the person on the other side with my own voice, but this is a luxury when that person is in another country which very often is what happens.

So how are businesses fixing this?

They are relying on products like Skype to do the calling when the cost of the call could be potentially high, and for the rest of the cases, they do phone calls. Both solutions are valid and serve the purpose, but they are far from being efficient because:

1. Skype requires you to both have accounts, share contacts, add the contact and wait to be accepted. All of this, without mentioning it doesn’t have any kind of tool to monitor how your employees are handling customer calls.
2. A phone call without exception, has a cost on any of the involved parties and implies an extra effort from your potential customer that’s greater than with a Skype call. Having to dial a phone number, an extension number and potentially wait on a music-on-hold queue, are things most of us find deeply unpleasant and are willing to avoid.

The right tool for the job

Not every business needs to interact with their customers, but:

1. Some businesses are doing perfectly fine with a live-chat and they won’t even need a phone number, ever.
2. Some businesses exist thanks to those interactions and having both live-chats and a call center is the only thing that has worked for them. And finally …
3. There are those that have a live-chat and receive a considerable amount of calls but not to justify having a call center.

It may not seem obvious at first sight, but the ideal solution would be for live-chats to support calls right within the chat window.

The solution we built

Adding voice/video calling capabilities to any product, or creating one from scratch, can be extremely difficult, much more complex than sending text over the Internet for the simple reason human voice needs to be transmitted in real time in order to be able to have an intelligible conversation. We believe this is the reason live-chat vendors haven’t added this feature to their products yet. The demand clearly exists.

With all of this in mind, we decided voice calling shouldn’t be more complex than doing two clicks, and shouldn’t be more expensive than paying for your Internet connection. We also noticed that a click-to-call solution was hardly what businesses were looking for, that’s way too basic.

Toky is what came out after digesting everything we thought was right, and eliminating everything we found unnecessary. One of these unnecessary things was being yet another live-chat solution with a call button on it. We didn’t want that because we realized we couldn’t possibly do it as good as existing players in the time frame these kind of solutions are still relevant, so we took the approach of being a complement or replacement (in some cases) by being able to coexist in the same website.

So Toky was born, and this is our first shot on building a better tool for support/sales and to become “the natural evolution of live-chats”.

Look what we built at: toky.co

Publicado originalmente en blog.toky.co

Carlos Ruiz Diaz | CEO & Co-founder at Toky