Instant messaging has several advantages over email for some applications:
- There is a more immediate and urgent alert when a message is received,
- The conversation is two-way because of the speed of transmission
- The system is aware when a user is off-line.
- The potential to use SMS to a mobile phone when an operator is off-line.
This makes Instant messaging a good solution for:
- Sales enquiries
- Customer support applications
- Alerting operators of exceptions
To benefit from this, we need to interface our web applications with one of the instant messaging systems. Unfortunately the technical details of the most popular systems are not public. However there is a community of programmers who have reverse-engineered the details, and developed systems to interface with them.
We have done some initial research in this area, and developed a web-based instant messaging system for customer support and sales support situations. The link to this is on the bottom left of every page on this site (Click here for live chat).
When you start a conversation an MSN Messenger session is started on a computer in our office and you will be talking to our MD (Bob Browning). If Bob is away from his desk (or doesn't use his computer) for more than five minutes the system autmatically indicates to the use that the operator is off line and no conversation can be started.
The status of this is beta testing, and we are running it on our in-house system. We would be happy to make it available to our clients to evaluate the technology. |
