A friend asked me recently about adding live chat to their business web site. This is the kind of functionality where site visitors can click a button to initiate a chat session with a company representative. Some of these will even pop-up a dialogue box on their own, asking the visitor if they need assistance from a live person. I’m sure most of you have encountered this kind of thing somewhere before.

Here is the five second test for whether you should consider adding live chat to your site:

Does your organization already have a call center fielding questions and/or orders from your customers?

If yes: you should consider live web-based chat as another medium for their efforts.

If no: you most likely won’t benefit from live chat.

Live chat is not going to help you much if you don’t already have a large force of people engaging one-on-one with your customers. The reason is that if you don’t already have those kind of staff, you most likely aren’t pursuing outcomes that live chat support can serve well. And you most certainly don’t have the human resources to do it well.