This product is being designed to provide real-time customer service solution to medium and large businesses. It solves many of the online problems that customers primarily face in getting product support and services in terms of cost overshoot, email latency and communication gap. This project addresses these problems by providing a plug-in for business industry that will integrate to their web sites that will provide consumers with real-time chat facility with company’s support and sales department.

Costumer, with queries, will visit the company’s web site that will have a pointer to the chat center. This chatting interface is web-page based, which prevents the headaches of downloading plug-ins on the consumer side or even applets if internet connection is slow. The consumer will be subjected to a pre-chat scanning mode that will extract most of the information about the consumer problems/queries. The required data plus the customer history is used to determine the best possible agents to connect this consumer to. If these rules fail, then the costumer will be connected with the longest waiting agent available. The system will also maintain the entire chat logs and will give the flexibility to the user to have that chat transcript mail to him. This chat log will be sent to the agent next time this user logins. This will assist the agent to arrive at a solution quickly by looking at the previous communication.

Companies will have operators/agents to entertain consumer grievances as per their skill sets. These agent capabilities plus the acquired data from the consumer define certain rules, which will be used in request routing. Agents are responsible for providing solutions to the consumer queries quickly and efficiently or even direct them to the appropriate URL by push-page technology. They also have the ability to transfer the chat session to another agent or to invite other agents in a conference call.

A supervisor agent console is also available which will monitor the activities of these agents, system throughput, force termination of chat sessions etc.

The main features of Chat Center are:

• Keeps the customer engaged until an agent becomes available. During this period, it extracts the related customer information
• Auto-routes chat to the most appropriate agent
• Extract previous chats of the customer from the database and sends them to the agent
• Extracts related customer data from the database and sends it to the agent along with the chat
• Informs the supervisor about the agent’s status (real time monitoring)
• Sends alerts to supervisor and other executives that where chats are pending
• Provides graphical and textual reports about the performance of Chat Center and service level of an agent and other entities