Glossary

Before there were ecommerce stores, there were brick and mortar stores and large businesses that required live support for their customers. What was the solution? Well, before there was live chat, there were call centers. Call centers are staffed by live agents or live representatives with backgrounds in customer service, customer support, or sales, who are trained to respond to general customer questions on phone calls or emails. Call centers were a way of offloading some of the floods of incoming customer inquiries to a team specifically trained to answer them. 

Of course, the advantages of outsourced customer support also come with some disadvantages as well. While customers might be guaranteed a faster response time from call center support agents, they might not get the answers that they actually need. It’s a compromise between timing and accuracy. Your team knows your own brand and your own products or services the best, but you might not be able to respond to your customers’ questions within a few minutes, so you have to send your customers to a call center instead. Even worse, call center pricing tends to be expensive, so you’re not exactly getting a good deal. Call centers still exist and are still widely used in many industries, but why agree to so big a compromise and so high an expense? If you have a business website, you can easily download TextChat live chat and staff it in-house. You’ll save on the expense of outsourced live agents and create a better customer experience when your own sales and support team can actually efficiently and accurately respond to your website visitors’ questions in real time.