Many online poker affiliates have offered live support to their players. Whether an affiliate is large or small there are pros and cons to offering live support. There are few online poker affiliates that offer live support even though many more have tried it. There is a reason for this.

Positives to Offering Live Support

There are many positive reasons to offer live support to your players. The biggest reason is from a sales lead point of view. If you have a link on your site to live support, and a qualified person is there to talk with the player, the chances of closing a lead increases substantially. The best qualified person is going to be the site owner but a partner or employee with the website that is very familiar with the offers and the online poker industry will be just as good. If a player can get their questions answered thoroughly and quickly they will be much more likely to trust the site and sign up for an offer. The player will have the security of knowing that if there is a problem you are there solve them.

Players will also have questions after they sign up. These questions will include whether a player is tracked, suggestions about a new poker room to try, payment questions or general poker questions. The more a player knows that their affiliate is there for them, the more loyal they will be. This type of player will tell their friends how great the support is and refer other players. Support is important to many players, especially newer players that can grow to become high volume players. There is a big advantage to being on a first name basis with your players and potential sign ups.

Live Support Options

If an affiliate decides to offer live support they have several solutions. They may choose to use a chat program such as MSN or Skype. An affiliate could use a chat program to also accept calls from potential clients. While this is a free solution, there are some downsides. The first issue is that it is difficult to manage any kind of volume on these chat programs. It is difficult to manage multiple conversations without forgetting about a client waiting or making an embarrassing error. Another problem is that spammers will attempt to contact the affiliate on the chat programs and it will be impossible to filter them out since the support person will have to accept all chat requests in case it is a player.

Another option is to rent a live chat software package. These are very efficient for higher volume affiliates. The software keeps good logs and keeps player in a queue to avoid any problems such as confusing multiple conversations. If live support is not available the software will take a message that is forwarded to the affiliate's email address. The downside of this is that the live chat software packages cost about $100 a year. They can be two or three times more for bigger affiliates that need more advanced software solutions. Spammers can also be a nuisance on line chat support as well.

Some live chat companies also offer support services to take the place of having to do support yourself. This is a terrible option. These support people are often outsourced. You will be paying for a service that will be subpar. That is because these support people will not be knowledgeable about your website. The support staff could handle hundreds of different websites. It would be easy for them to make a mistake and confuse one website with another.

Negative With All Live Chat Solutions

The negative for all of these options is that it will eventually become abused. Not only will the spammers become extremely annoying, but the clients may become a problem as well. Many poker affiliates that have attempted live support run into problems where players will ask very basic questions that can be found in the FAQ because they become accustomed to going directly to live support with every easy question. Some players will also vent their bad beat stories to an affiliate if they are available and there is nobody else to online for them to vent. This can become a major time drain and burden when every time a player gets drawn out on they complain on chat programs. After a few "Online poker is rigged" chats with players an affiliate may start to get second thoughts about their choice to offer live support.

Live Chat Policy Suggestions

If you decide to offer live support I have a few suggestions. One is not to use your personal chat accounts. Set up a Skype or MSN account specific to your website. That way you do not ruin a personal chat account with spammers and bad beat stories when you are not working. You should only offer live support during set hours instead of having the chat program open every time you are online. This way a player knows when they can find live chat online and the affiliate is not tied down to live support at all hours of the day. Players can always leave a message, create a support ticket, or send an email if live support is not available.

While many poker affiliates, especially big ones, have abandoned live support there are still many affiliates that choose to use it. If you decide to try live support you should be prepared for some of the issues and the time it will take out of your day. You may greatly increase your player sign ups and retention. You will just need to decide if the loss of productivity is worth it.