A team of four supports customers by email. Somebody suggests adding live chat, because customers expect it and competitors have it.
It is added. It is answered promptly for a fortnight while it is new, and then increasingly slowly as the novelty passes and the email queue reasserts itself.
Six months later the chat widget takes four minutes to be answered, which is worse than having no chat at all, since it promised immediacy and delivered a slower version of email.
When email works best
Complex issues, anything needing attachments or research, and questions where a considered answer is worth more than a fast one.
When the telephone works best
Anything urgent, anything emotional, and situations where a back and forth conversation resolves in three minutes what email takes four exchanges to cover.
When live chat works best
Quick pre purchase questions and simple account matters, where immediacy is the entire value and a delayed reply removes it.
The problem with live chat for small teams
It requires somebody continuously available. Four people cannot cover a working day plus holidays plus illness plus everything else they do.
The problem with adding channels
Each one fragments attention, and a team stretched across three channels answers all of them worse than it answered one.
Decide: where your customers already are
Rather than where the industry says they should be, since a channel nobody uses is a cost and a channel everybody uses cannot be ignored.
Decide: what the questions actually need
A team whose volume is mostly simple pre purchase questions and one whose volume is mostly complex account issues should make different choices.
Decide: what you can sustain in August
With two people away, which is the coverage arithmetic in support coverage across holidays and sickness.
Decide: whether a channel can be automated
Which changes the calculation entirely, since chat answered automatically has none of the staffing problem that makes it expensive.
Consider: closing a channel properly
Better than running it badly, and considerably better received when explained rather than allowed to decay.
Consider: the routing between channels
Where a chat becomes a call or an email becomes a chat, which is the handover question in how saas teams route chat to sales or support.
Consider: what each channel signals
An unanswered chat widget signals disorganisation, and no widget signals nothing at all, which is why the half staffed option is the worst one.
Consider: what happens to the channel you keep
Removing a badly served channel frequently improves the remaining one considerably, since the attention it was consuming returns to where the volume actually is.
Consider: the asynchronous middle ground
A message that does not promise immediacy but does get answered the same day suits a great many questions and costs a fraction of what live chat staffed by people does.
Add chat only if it can actually be immediate
An assistant answering chat instantly gives a small team the channel customers want without the staffing requirement that makes it unsustainable, and hands over to email or a call when something genuinely needs a person. The comparison is set out in email support vs instant answers, and the training question in training a small support team without a manual. See it working on the demo, compare on pricing, and the sector view sits under small business.