Online chat and chat rooms have come a long way in recent decades. In this quick guide to the history of online chat, you’ll find out where online chat started and how that history informed Arena Live Chat, AI and today’s chat experiences.
The Origins of Online Chat, 1970-1990
The first email was sent in 1971, and chat followed soon after. It was limited to universities, researchers, and governments. We see the first online chat emerge.
1973: Talkomatic for PLATO system
Developed at the University of Illinois in 1960, this early computer network included chat rooms, email, screen sharing, and other networked features. The key development form PLATO was the launch of Talkomatic in 1973. Talkomatic supported multi-user chat interactions. The technology was limited compared to today’s tools – the application had a maximum of six rooms and a limit of five participants per chat room.
1978: Bulletin Board System (BBS)
Bulletin board systems (BBS) can be seen as social media before the Internet. The first BBS was invented in 1978 in Chicago. BBS users mainly used dial-up modems to connect to a BBS, post messages, and download files. By one estimate, there were thousands of active BBS systems active in the 1980s and 1990s before the Internet, as we know it, took over in popularity.
1980: CompuServe CB Simulator
The 1980s saw a significant leap forward, with online chat becoming more widespread. Compuserve, a critical early Internet service provider, launched CB simulator in 1980. This online chat service made history as the first chat service available to the public.
1988: Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
The launch of IRC pushed the adoption of online chat much further. Internet Relay Chat – along with email – is one of the few Internet communication apps from before 1990 that remain in use today. IRC made history when it was used to report Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991. While IRC is still online, it has declined in popularity due to the launch of social media platforms.
The popularity of online chat exploded in the 1990s as more user-friendly technology, marketing, and innovation made the Internet available to millions of people.
Online Chat In The 1990s
In the 1990s, web browsers became popular, bringing millions of people online. However, many people still had slower connection speeds, so text chat was the perfect solution. Chat messages are easy to transmit, which allows near real-time conversations.
In the 1990s, chat rooms boomed, so it’s difficult to discuss them in depth. Instead, let’s look at some of the most influential services.
AOL Chat Rooms and AOL Messenger
In the 1990s, America Online (AOL) was a prominent Internet service provider. The company also became known for its popular chat rooms. The company offered unlimited access to its chat rooms to its subscribers. In 1998, the company made its instant messenger service – AIM – available to non-AOL subscribers.
MSN Messenger (1999-2014)
Released in 1999, MSN Messenger was another popular chat service. The chat app was widely perceived as a competitor to AOL’ AIM app. The app blended 1 on 1 messaging with some social networking functionality.
ICQ
Launched in 1996, ICQ quickly acquired millions of chat users. The chat service was notable because it was available on multiple operating systems – Windows, Apple, and Unix. Text messaging between individual users formed the core of the app. At its peak in 2001, the app had an estimated 100 million users.
Customer Service Chat, Chatbots, and Arena: Today’s Online Chat
As social media platforms grew in popularity in the 2000s, instant messaging apps lost some of their users. Despite that loss, chat and messaging remained popular features. One-on-one messaging (also known as private messaging) remained a key feature on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites.
Three trends emerged over the past decade that shaped online chat as we know it today.
Customer Service Chat
Online chat services started to move away from purely social and recreational uses with the rise of customer service chat. This chat service took off by promising greater speed than phone or email customer service. Chat service is also cheaper to provide – about 15-33% cheaper than phone support, according to one estimate. The cost savings is driven by the fact that it is possible for one rep to participate in multiple chat sessions in succession.
Streaming Chat Experiences
Chat and online experiences came together with streaming chat experiences in the 2010s. Across multiple platforms like Discord, Twitch, YouTube Live, and Facebook Live, users could come together and share their thoughts in text chat. These experiences often involved a shared video experience, such as watching a live stream.
With tools like Chat Analyzer, brands can see how their organization and products are being discussed by users in Twitch chats.
Chatbots
The success of delivering customer service through online chat prompted a question: could computers do more of the work? The rise of chatbots – a kind of automation that relied on scripts and simple automation – provided the answer. These automated chat experiences show that many repetitive questions (e.g., what’s the status of my order?) could be handled through automation.
Using scripts to handle routine questions, chatbots helped companies redirect customer service staff to address complex issues.
Arena Live Chat
The launch of Arena in 2017 took the history of chat in a new direction. Arena’s live chat brought the social experience of chat rooms back in a new way.
Brands and publishers can now engage their customers directly on their websites. Social media platforms increasingly struggle with disinformation and toxic content, so people are hungry for alternative ways to connect online. Arena also made live chat more accessible since it is a lightweight application that can run on almost any website.
What Is The Future of Online Chat?
Artificial intelligence and the need to connect with others beyond social media are two significant trends for the future. Large language models like chatGPT show that chat-style interactions with AI have exciting potential. In some ways, chatGPT brings together a search engine experience with chat.
AI chat experiences are powerful. These technologies are in their early days, so it’s difficult to know how they will used. For example, AI chat tools may be useful in facilitating brandsafe discussions and moderating conversations. AI chat may also play a role in growing online communities and easing the burden of community management.
Connecting with other people is the core of online chat. The first chat platforms succeeded because they offered group and 1-on-1 messaging. The social need to connect through chat isn’t going anywhere. Instead, we will see the growth of online chat experiences on many different websites. We look forward to sharing more insights exploring how AI and people can come together to offer exciting digital experiences.
Harnessing The Power of Chat For Your Website
The history of chat has seen many technologies come and go. What hasn’t changed is the desire to connect with other people. Brands seeking higher customer engagement are vital to give your audience a place to connect. Find out how to grow a digital community on your website with Arena.
Live chat software is a popular way to deliver better customer service, fantastic online events and get more leads for the sales team. There are multiple live chat apps on the market and each one is suited for different needs. You’re about to learn how live chat works, the key features of live chat, and the key benefits of online live chat for companies.
What is Live Chat?
In simple terms, live chat provides a chat window where people can interact in real-time. It is a type of messaging software that lets two or more people interact by entering text. For example, customers can ask questions about a product they are interested in or check on the status of their report. The tool is particularly popular for live chat for customer support and sales teams, but it can also be used to increase audience engagement on online events, video live streaming and live blogs.
The specific benefits of live chat software depend on the type of technology you use and the features you select. The best chat messaging apps are lightweight and run quickly on your website. For example, some live chat apps have chat feed management tools which come in handy when you have a chat room with many participants.
To really understand how live chat technology works, it is helpful to understand the two main types of chat technology. One type uses automated chat agents to handle simple questions while the other is focused on building human relationships. Both types of chat apps have their role to play.
The two types of chat technology
The world of chat services can be summarized into two broad categories: automated services that use automatic responses and actual live chats with human-to-human interactions.
Automated Chatbots
Also known as automated chatbots or messenger chatbots, these services are helpful in cases where there are standard questions and answers (e.g. what is the status of my order). Artificial intelligence is often able to manage these types of basic customer conversations effectively. For example, many of your customers may call to ask about store hours, the status of a shipment and other basic questions. With canned responses, it is easy to use chatbots to respond to these questions. Use these tools to deliver standardized conversations at scale with customers. While this category of chat tools is helpful, it is important to recognize its limitations.
Automated chatbots are usually not effective at complex real-time chat support. In addition, the lack of a real chat operator means there is a lack of human touch that might be necessary in many scenarios. If a customer is upset or displeased, relying on automatic responses is not enough. Your business systems need to have the flexibility to use a chat app staffed by real people.
Live Chat
Cloud-based live chat software like Arena takes a different approach. Instead of restricting people to interact with automated chat agents, the Arena chat solution is focused on bringing groups together. For example, Rogers Media uses Arena Live Chat to bring sports fans together. In addition, Arena Live Chat makes communication between individuals easier.
The downside to live chat software that focuses on people instead of bots is the staffing effort. Take the use case of an online event where you plan to announce a new product to your audience. You may have a MC to act as the host of the event and a few influencer guests to drive excitement. In addition, you might also have a small support team to handle technical or product questions when running larger events.
While AI-powered chatbots have their value, there is another type of chat platform you need. Chat services like Arena are designed to offer an engaging experience for customers. They are designed to bring together a group of people – like sports fans supporting their favorite team in a major competition.
Benefits of Live Chat
Adding real-time chat to your website benefits your company in many powerful ways. Here, we have highlighted the four most important benefits of adding a live chat software into your business’ strategy.
1. Deliver real-time customer support
Customers hate to wait for support when they have a problem, and the days of making customers’ way in phone queues are over. Online chat support for your clients allows chat agents to quickly ask a few questions and solve the majority of customer problems in no time.
For even greater efficiency, some managers review live chat transcripts to find out the most common questions. Mining live chat data for insights means you can develop better answers and scripts to help your customer support staff provide even better support.
2. Increase sales and conversions
A live chat solution can boost the bottom line directly! For example, you can present a chat window to customers when they visit certain pages or take certain actions (e.g. viewing multiple product description pages). By converting more of your online visitors into leads, your sales lead will have more opportunities to spend their time with warm leads.
3. Boost customer loyalty
Delivering faster high-quality support to customers is one of the keys to unlocking higher customer lifetime value. When your customers are able to get their questions answered and problems solved, they are more likely to keep buying from your company.
4. Increase advertising revenue
The way to raise ad revenue with live chat is simple. You need a way to convince your website visitors to stay on your website longer. Regularly offering engaging online events is a great way to keep visitors engaged for an hour or more at a time. The longer visitors stay on your website, the more ads you can display.
As you host more online events with Arena Live Chat, you can use the customer data platform to find out which content and experiences your audience likes the most. Use these insights to create even better events in the future.
As you implement live chat more thoroughly, there are even more benefits available. Find out more in our comprehensive guide: Top 40 Live Chat Benefits You Need to Know.
Why is Live Chat Fundamental to Build a Strong Online Community
Live chat is essential for building a community on your website as it fosters real-time interaction and engagement. By offering immediate responses to visitors’ inquiries, live chat creates a more personalized and responsive experience. This instant communication helps build trust and rapport with users, making them feel valued and heard. As users interact more frequently with live chat, they are likely to return to your website, participate in discussions, and contribute to a vibrant community atmosphere.
Furthermore, live chat can facilitate deeper connections among community members by enabling group chats, forums, and discussions. These interactions allow users to share experiences, exchange knowledge, and support one another, fostering a sense of belonging. By integrating live chat into your website, you not only enhance customer support but also cultivate a loyal and engaged community that can drive sustained growth and user retention.
Live chat core features
Sorting through all of the chat app options on the market is tough. To save you time, here are some of the most important chat features most companies consider essential. The specific chat capabilities you need will vary depending on a few factors including your company size and whether online events are an important part of your business model.
Easy To Use Chat User Interface
To maintain high customer satisfaction, the chat vendor must provide a simple and easy chat experience. At a minimum, the real-time chat user interface should be fast and run in most web browsers. Without a fast and lightweight user interface, the real-time conversation will slow down and become less interesting.
The best way to assess if a chat platform is easy to use is to take the platform for a spin! Click here to test Arena for free. As a starting point, you may want to hold a question and answer session with your management team and your employees. This type of chat event is a good way to take live chat for a test drive.
Chat Widgets
Support for chat widgets is critical! Chat widgets mean that the website can be installed on your website using a chat plugin. By making your chat accessible to all of your online visitors, it will be easier to get people using the chat app to interact with you. Chat widgets on a website are powerful because the end-user does not have to install anything – there is no app to download.
Chat Analytics
When you add a chat to your business model, it should be easy to gather data. For example, you may want to measure customer satisfaction or engagement. Some chat providers like Arena also offer a customer data platform (CDP) which gives you advanced analytics capabilities.
Chat Feed Management
As more users join a chat window, keeping up with the chat feed gets more difficult. The best chat website software, like Arena, has features to help users navigate conversations using threads, private messages, and 1:1 messages.
Without these chat capabilities, it may be impossible to host large online events with your chat app. The chat feed can easily become overwhelming when you have hundreds or thousands of people in the chat room. With one-on-one messaging and Q&A support, it is far easier to keep the session focused.
Chat Emojis
Emojis are a popular way to add fun and variety to chat interactions. As emojis have increased in popularity, support for emojis is an important feature in chat apps. Without this feature, your audience may become disengaged as they are used to using this feature on social media platforms. Arena Live Chat includes support for emojis so you can keep your audience fully engaged.
Chat Transcript Support
The ability to export a chat transcript (or conversation history) is a valuable chat option. In terms of customer experience, your customer may want the option to review details (e.g. verify a charge has been removed from their credit card) of the discussion.
From a company standpoint, reviewing a chat transcript is a valuable training and development tool. For example, your customer service agents may struggle to answer a certain type of question like questions about out-of-stock products or customization requests. Regularly reviewing the top questions in chat sessions means you can keep your finger on the pulse of your customers. Reviewing chat in combination with call recordings is a powerful way to empower managers to deliver better coaching to their employees.
Moderation Features
What happens when you have a large number of people in your chat channel? If the chat channel is open to the public, you may face struggles with profanity and other unacceptable comments. To solve this problem, Arena Chat has moderation functionalities includes a profanity feature and the ability to quietly remove disruptive users.
Integration With Existing Business Systems
Adding chat conversations to your business should be easy. You can add Arena chat software to your website in less than 10 minutes. Also, Arena is built to integrate with popular platforms like WordPress. That means you can set up fast and start your first online chat easily.
Flexible Plans For Chat Pricing
Flexible plans are the final important feature to consider in a chat vendor. Many chat vendors offer standardized plans like a business plan or enterprise plan. Also, you can sometimes find a free limited plan like Arena. Finally, check to see if the chat service offers custom plans which are helpful if you have a large volume of chat users and need advanced features.
The top live chat use cases
Knowing the most popular chat software trends and use cases gives you a starting point to develop your chat team and chat strategy.
Live Chat For Customer Support
Thousands of companies are using live chat for support instead of customer service email. In this use case, customers ask their questions directly to a chat operator. As a communication channel, there are a lot of benefits of live chat for customer service, because you don’t have to worry about critical information (e.g. order number, account number, address, etc) being misunderstood. By reducing the potential for confusion, your chat support agents will have more capacity to focus on solving the customer’s main problem.
Chat staffing can become a challenge in some cases. For example, some retailers face a large number of chat requests during the holiday season. This challenge can be mitigated by developing scripts with canned responses to the most common questions. Of course, canned responses are just one part of delivering great customer service. You may also want to consider scheduling regular lunch & learn sessions to share best practices internally in chat support.
Fundamentally, modern customer service needs to offer multiple digital channels. Equipping customer service teams with live chat, an email address, and a phone number has become table stakes for many companies.
Don’t forget about your sales team! With the right technology and design, a sales chat window can fill the sales funnel. For example, you might set up your website to display a chat box when a customer visits certain pages like a checkout page. To provide the best response time, many companies use pre-chat forms to gather basic information like name, contact information, and an overview of the problem.
For sales reps, capturing leads through live chat is an effective way to grow leads. Incoming chats are usually a good sign that the person is very interested in learning more. If the chat volume becomes too high, you may need to divert some chat app users to other channels like calling your sales team instead.
Live Chat For Events
To gain a competitive edge, you need to give your prospects and online visitors a reason to keep coming back to your website. That’s where organizing virtual events with live gives you an edge to stand out. In virtual events and hybrid events, a chat window gives your audience the chance to have a real-time conversation without disrupting the flow of the event.
Adding a live chat app to your events is a smart way to deepen your engagement. For example, colleges and universities like Coventry University in the UK and California State University, Northridge have used live chat to engage new students, deepen relationships and grow admissions. Live chat is a key part of offering personalized services to students in higher education.
It’s not just colleges and universities that are turning to online events either. Companies are turning to online events like online events for internal meetings to lift employee engagement and online events for hiring to attract talent.
Live Chat Is Your Path To More Engaged Customers
Adding live chat to your company’s website used to be solely as a strategy to improve customer service. Today’s live chat solutions are much more powerful. You can use Arena Live Chat to power online events which means more opportunities for conversions. For publishers focused on advertising, live chat is powerful because keeping your audience on your website longer.
To see for yourself how Live Chat works, take Arena for a test drive. You can test Arena for free for two weeks to see if it helps you get more customers. Installing Arena Live Chat usually takes less than thirty minutes – often less time than that – so you can easily get the app installed and deepen engagement with your customers.
