[csharpminor]

Agree. At one of my startups we hooked a $350k ARR enterprise customer over webchat. We also received some of the best early UX feedback through webchat.

Developers are somewhat different from the general population in that we like to read documentation rather than going to a person for help. But for almost everyone else having someone to answer a question immediately is the preferred experience.

[yummypaint]

How did you establish that the customer would not have contacted you if not for webchat? If i go to a company's website already intending to contact them i might type in a chat box before i email or call them, but they would have gotten my business regardless.

[satvikpendem]

How did you establish that the customer would have contacted you if not for webchat?

In the parent's scenario, it seems likely that the buyer for that enterprise was simply browsing through the site, or perhaps looking at various options, when they found the parent's site, saw that there was a chat and saw the near immediate response, asked a few questions and eventually set up a meeting. To do that over email would have likely taken days.

Source: I've had something like this happen too.

[csharpminor]

To answer your question, they told us directly in our first sales meeting (we didn't close the deal over live chat lol). The director we were speaking to said something along the lines of "and to think we probably wouldn't be here if I hadn't written you in chat."