Messengers and Business

Dec 16, 2004

I’ve been thinking…what an important role online chat messengers have been playing in my business. Just had a long chat with a client on the Yahoo! messenger and got the project. I almost chat daily with my various clients using either Yahoo! messenger or MSN. I also use Skype but this way I cannot save important conversations.

Most of my clients are independent entrepreneurs and hence, are flexible about using freely available tools to communicate. These tools make us available to each other all the time…at least as long as we are in front of the computer. Without these tools, it would have been almost impossible (read, very costly) to conduct business. We chat for hours sometimes, discussing work, budgets, schedules, and even future plans. A client recently sent me the text of a chat we had had a-year-and-a-half ago because I couldn’t recall the logic he had explained for his program.

Not only I, I have come across many individuals who conduct their businesses using these free messengers. A few days ago we had a conference chat: the client was in the US, the web designer was in Brazil, and I, the contentg writer and the PHP prgrammer was here, in India.

Now I’m thinking of installing live chat software on my website so that I can chat with prospective clients in realtime. This way I’ll end up with more and more clients and it’ll be easier for me to answer their queries when they are visiting the website.