One of my earliest Ingk Labs spinoffs was sold this week. InstantService was acquired by ATG (NASDAQ: ARTG) and will be merged with their growing suite of enterprise e-commerce services.
Upon debuting InstantService, I recall AT&T, IBM and Motorola asserting, “We believe our customers prefer to [disconnect from what was then mostly dial-up and] call us in our call centers. And chatting is free.” ~ [ palmface ]
My how times change — they are all customers today and InstantService continued to grow through the dot-com collapse and our ongoing recession. As it turns out, customer support is among the last services that corporations consider on the recession chopping block. Sony reduced phone use by 50% and achieved over 90% customer approval. McAfee now handles 80% of all support through InstantService chat, cutting average wait time from 25 minutes to 40 seconds and reducing support costs by 86%. At Ingk Labs, we call this an experiment in recession-proof technology.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.