Live support from your website? Can you do it for free?

Ed Charkow
I'm a freelance programmer and somehow I managed to get clients, speak with them, and generate leads for years without a live help system. To be honest, I had put in bids for a "live" help system several times, and I wasn't aware there were free options out there.

Well, early last week I went hunting for something that would be my help desk and give me live support. I had some pretty strict requirements because I am not always sitting in front of my computer. I needed it to work like my present contact system and have live help built right in. I finally found something that works for me.

It's called helpcenterlive and if you do a search for it, you will find it in a heart beat. I was a little disappointed at first because even though it was free, I kept closing the window by mistake. Today I started going through all of the features, and I actually went to their website and roamed through their forum. I found out that they have an application that sits on your desktop and works just like the browser.

Now the important thing here is that what is it doing for my business?

My business is exploding. I have gotten 15 small copy writing jobs in a matter of days just because they can contact me instantly. In dollar signs this free script has paid for itself quite a few thousand times over. Because of the types of service my website provides, there really isn't a way for my clients to just "checkout," most of them need to speak with me and I need to speak with them to give them an accurate quote. They expect someone providing a service like mine to be professional and a live help desk is really helping me do that for my clients.

I'm sure the fact that my "presence" on-line is now much more professional I will get even more clients on a regular basis because they can contact me easily and my competition might take 3 days to get back to them.

Will it work for your site? Probably, if your selling anything it's nice to be able to talk with the folks who are your customers. It leads to more referrals and additional work. If your not putting customer service at the top of your priorities your missing out on the best part of being a webmaster. Security.

About the Author

Ed Charkow is the lead programmer at http://www.stmadeveloper.com . Stmadeveloper provides services for webmasters, freelancers, and newsletter publishers.