VietNamNet Bridge - The demand for live chat in Vietnam has increased by 30 percent in the last two years, raising the market value to $20 million.

Vietnamese internet users can access a website and find a chat window waiting for them, and can receive replies for their complaints after several minutes. They understand that tens of companies are competing to provide customer care services.

LiveChat, the live chat support software provider, has released a report on customer behavior based on the figures it collected from 13,000 businesses in the world in 22 industries. 

The report said the demand for live chat all over the world has increased by 40 percent in the last two years, while the figure was 30 percent in Vietnam.

In fact, the services were first provided in Vietnam four years ago. Subiz of VietnamBIZ was one of them. Not only providing services in the Vietnamese market, the business also reaches the world market. In 2015, Subiz reportedly had 6,000 user accounts. 

Five years ago, calling customer care center and sending email were the two ways for customers to contact manufacturers. But things are different now, in the context of the social network boom. 

Customers may make requests through different ways – companies’ websites, Facebook, Zalo, forums, YouTube and smartphones – and they need quick responses. This puts pressure on enterprises: they have to give answers quickly or lose customers.

There are many live chat support software providers in the market. These include Harapage of Haravan which supports the management of live chats on Facebook and Zalo; and vChat which supports the live chats on enterprises’ websites and Facebook.  

Caresoft, established as a virtual switchboard provider, has also joined the market with solutions to manage information from email and Facebook, live chat and SMS. IZIHelp (Firefly Innovative) is known as giving support on most channels nowadays when integrating GooglePlay and Youtube as well.

The attractiveness of the Vietnamese market is high enough to lure foreign firms as well, such as Zendesk and LiveChat. Their major customers are multinational conglomerates.

An analyst commented that Subiz is leading the market in live chat on websites, while IZIHelp is Number 1 in the number of support channels.

About the value of the market, the analyst said it is not less than $10 million.

According to Huynh Lam Ho, CEO of Haravan, the owner of Harapage which has 20,000 accounts, said there are some 300,000 accounts administering businesses’ fanpages on Facebook Vietnam. If every shop spends $10 a month on live chat software and just half of them use the service, the value would be $20 million a year.

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