The Operations Research / Management Science Blog

I recently bumped into an article titled “Live chat: your new online salesperson” on CNNMoney.com. The article briefly talked about the potential of online instant messaging as a new sales tool for companies. More and more companies, especially those who sell their products online, are adding the live chat feature as a way to provide customer support on their websites. Some websites, such as Dell.com, provide online live chat as an option when a customer who needs help navigates to the “Support” section, while some other websites include chat boxes on their front pages and use live chat as both a customer support and a sales tool.

There are several advantages of online chat compared to traditional phone support. Some of the advantages include:

• Live chat provides many more functionalities than phone support. For example, the surveillance capabilities enable retailers to monitor in real time which pages and products that the customer has viewed. These functionalities, when combined with the right sales strategies, can become a valuable tool that no company should ignore.
• Live chat support can be more efficient, since well-trained service representatives / support technicians can help multiple customers at the same time. Most of us have the experience of chatting with two or more friends on an instant messenger at the same time. It is not too hard.
• Live-chat-based customer service allows easier input of customer data. Instead of asking the customers to say their mailing addresses over the phone and typing them at the same time, a service representative could simply copy the information provided by a customer in the chat box and paste it into their databases. This in turn increases efficiency.

This led me to wonder how Queueing Theory, an important concept in Operations Research, should be applied to live-chat-based customer support and service systems to boost their efficiency. I don’t know if there are already a number of researchers working on this topic. However, I think this should be a rather interesting topic to study. There have already been a lot of research done on modeling and optimizing call centers using Queueing Theory. I guess many of the results are directly applicable to live chat systems with a few modifications. Anyway, I just thought this might be a good opportunity for some OR researchers who are interested in a new test ground for Queueing Theory.