The MeeboMe widget received praise as a micro-marketing tool recently. For both the purpose of lightweight customer service and conversion at the point of sale, Mike Simonsen likes MeeboMe.

I was involved (design mainly) with integrating a live chat widget into the Homestead site at the point of sale in order to increase conversion. The widget lowered the barrier of communication with a sales rep so significantly that it really pissed off the sales team. People used the chat widget to talk about the most random (and often offensive) garbage, and that was a waste of valuable time for sales reps that are paid based on performance, not time-logged. Based on anecdotal evidence, a lead on the phone is a ton more valuable than a lead on a chat widget; they’re simply far more likely to convert to being a paying customer. Chats wasted the time of sales reps that could be fielding phone calls instead.

Perhaps in-site chat widgets like MeeboMe work better in other verticals (like Real Estate, which Mike Simonsen discusses), but my experiments with in-site chat in the hosting business proved fruitless.

Of course, perhaps my implementation sucked. I could easily be writting off chat too quickly. But, it wasn’t worth pursuing because the sales team never had a shortage of phone calls.

Source: Mike Simonsen’s post was originally found through Paul Kedrosky