Meebo ->IM customer service for the masses?
Nice to continue to see Yalie and YESee Seth Sternberg getting great press for Meebo. This is an interesting idea as it takes IM customer service and makes it readily available for small business owners. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of IM customer service (I think it’s slow and often cumbersome), but now there’s the option.
Palo Alto based Meebo is a Sequoia backed web chat company that allows users to access popular instant messaging services on a web page instead of using downloaded software. Our posts on Meebo are here - we’ve covered this company closely since its launch in September 2005.
Until February, every time a user visited Meebo they were required to re-enter their IM login credentials to access Yahoo, MSN, etc. Now, however, users may (but aren’t required to) create a Meebo account that stores these credentials, allowing for a single sign in to multiple IM services. This user registration feature is a key part to a new service they are launching today, called MeeboMe.
MeeboMe is a Flash-based chat widget that Meebo users can place on a website. This is not a group chat feature that companies like 3bubbles have launched in the recent past (and which are plagued by scaling issues). MeeboMe is a one-on-one communication between a website owner and a visitor.
If the widget is placed on the site (see embedded widget below), every current visitor on the site shows up as a contact on the website publisher’s meebo contact list. If the visitor chooses to email the publisher, that message pops up on the publisher’s screen, and a chat session can occur. Note that this is a two way mechanism - even if a visitor has not initiated chat, the publisher can ping the user anyway to initiate a conversation (this would freak me out if I was just visiting a site, but perhaps it will be a common thing in the future).
technorati tags:Yale, Meebo, Web2.0
August 3rd, 2006 at 9:04 pm
Customer Service Goes IM
For website owners, this is just another way to let your customers know that you’re readily available to answer their questions and it makes for a better shopping experience - especially if you can get your answers instantly without having to wait for…