The reason why live chat gives you the most bang for your buck is that it costs less to implement chat-based customer support when compared with all the other modes of live customer service. Here are five reasons why live chat and a favorable bottom line go hand in hand:

Parallel processing
A chat operator while assuming the role of a support specialist can attend to more than one live chat session at a time simultaneously. At times when customer interaction is at its peak, your support specialist can open several chat windows at a time and respond to customer inquiries. How many chat windows an operator can handle at a time depends entirely on his or her capability and experience. Telephone-based live support, on the other hand, supports one conversation at a time and all communication is linear in nature.

Accent Interference
As long as your chat operator understands your niche and has a good knowledge of your customer service procedures along with reasonably good English writing skills, his or her ethnic origin really makes little difference. Live chat-based interaction calls for the use of informal conversational English where clarity and brevity are of paramount importance. Regional accents and linguistic nuances are of little consequence in this model of customer communication.

Geographical Proximity
Your chat operators can provide customer service or technical support to your customers from anywhere in the world as long as they have web access. Configuring telephone connectivity across borders continues to remain an expensive proposition especially since many countries impose heavy tariffs on both outbound and inbound international telephone calls. There is no tax on chat, at least not yet!

The Veritable Paper Trail
Chat transcripts based on customer communication are easy to generate. They are built into live chat software. These printed transcripts can go a long way in improving the quality of your customer service. A supervisor or chat administrator can reverse engineer the service delivery process and identify potential pitfalls and problems in order to institute proactive measures in a timely manner. Chat transcripts are extremely useful during training sessions for new chat operators and service representatives. Although telephone conversations can be recorded, converting them into text transcripts is a whole different story and they are a far cry from the ease and convenience provided by transcripts generated by live chat software.

Comparing Apples and Apples
If you are considering the possibility of offering live support on your web site, live chat support software surely makes better sense. You will never be billed by the minute for live chat and your customers will thank you for the privilege to communicate with you in an open and uninhibited environment.