Let's start the tip with one real situation in which the company noticed a huge chasm between the processes and the technology: A company for software consultancy has developed an online wizard through which they acquire the needed information from prospective clients. From that information, they provide individual price and time quotes. But they didn't consider the long-term feasibility of the idea. The consultancy work requires constantly changing of working practices and accepting newest practices and methodologies. And in this point a problem appears: the website wizard can't be updated that often to match the changed practices (requires a lot of time for planning, designing and programming).

A lot of companies are afraid to establish a web presence in the first place, being afraid that it won't be as flexible and it won't provide the needed attention to customers and the needed level of customer service. Other companies do establish a web presence, but are not able to adapt the technology aspects to their constantly changing working processes.

Processes in this situation refer to customer interaction processes, ranging from aiding the purchase decision making, through the purchase process, ending with post-purchase customer service.
Technology in our case refers to the web presence of the company, including the website (front and back stage), all the information and functionalities it offers for customers, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders and the secured parts of the website.

And here we come to the chasm between them!
The chasm is the gap that exists between the automated customer interaction processes through web presence and the "real" everyday processes that are practiced in the company. Some of the scenarios that lead to chasm between the processes and technology are:

• if the company processes are not optimized before they are translated into web presence;
• if the processes are not well automated using the web-presence (mistakes in planning and design stage of web presence);

• if the processes are constantly changing, and the website features cannot be updated regularly according to the new ones (For e.g. software company using newest technologies);

• if the processes aren't able to be translated into technology language and to be automated (provision of personalized solutions);

• and similar.

The resolution point of this problem is the following: no matter who has designed and developed your online presence, adding live operators in the back scenes will make it powerful enough to answer to each customer need, process irregular orders or just provide the needed information. Online operators are able to fill in the chasm that exists between the things your customers can do online and the things they would like / should be able to do online.

And to come back to our example: The company found a perfect and permanent solution to their problem: putting a trained professional as online operator (using chat support software) to collect the client's information. The operator is free to ask for any type of needed information, at the same time establishing personal relationship with the prospective clients. That is a win-win situation.

We encourage you to be creative and tell us about your experiences in innovative usage of chat support solution!