Essential Digital Skills Level 1

111 videos, 7 hours and 55 minutes

Course Content

Using an online chat facility

Video 79 of 111
4 min 8 sec
English
English
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What we are going to do now is have a look at a website and look at different ways you can navigate through that website. There are lots of things you can do; you can search for text, you can search on the different search engines within the website but the first one we are going to look at is how to use the online chat facility on a website. So looking at our own website here, the chat icons are at the bottom. Now the chat will pop up, some websites will pop up automatically or you can just hit the little bubble icon and it will pop up. Different websites have different ways of doing it, but there will often be some kind of online chat.

If I have a chat facility, some kind of icon or word that says, "Chat with us." So what we have done now, we have got the pop up here. So in the box here, you can say anything you like. So if you are looking to ask it some certain information, so, "Do you offer health and safety online courses?" So you literally just type in what your question is and hit return. Now, this is on our website here the minute, this is a real person who is answering back but there are things called bots that answer back as well. These are computers but they are programmed to answer your questions. So as you type something on there, the algorithm within the program will answer it.

So in this example, we have asked, "Do you offer health and safety courses?" Well, if that was programmed through with our bot it will come up with an answerback, "Yes we do." It will give you some suggestions and links or it will ask further questions, it might say, "Do you want this as a classroom course or do you want it as an online course?" As you can see now, Haley is just replying. You see the little bubbles, they are bouncing on another line, it just means that she is then typing. So she has then said that they do offer the courses. So what we can do then is we can then answer back, we can find out any other questions that we want to know. So that is one method. So we are just gonna just say thank you because she is a real person on the other end here. Let us say bye. So in order to close that down, I am just gonna hit this X button at the top and then we can end the chat or I can continue the chat. So I can literally end the chat there. And a lot of websites will also give the opportunity to have an email with a transcript of what the chat was said. So if you have got a long chat with a company and they are answering a lot of your questions, you can then suggest different ways if you want to have a record of that.

You can have that emailed straight to your inbox. Here what we have got also is some little windows so you often see a little survey and this is just to help companies out in how they are handling the chat. So here we can just look at different levels, we will just give it a green to say "That's really good." And we can leave any feedback as well on the chat. Now, it is always a good idea if you can leave feedback if something has not quite worked properly for you or something is really good. It can help companies improve their chat facility later on. Thought we can just write here in the box, just write, excellent reply and whatever, just something that they can do and then we can hit the submit button and then we have given feedback back on that chat and then we can just hit the close button and then that is it. As you can see now down at the bottom here, there are little chat bubbles, this is what I spoke about earlier on. We click that, which will then open up a brand new chat, we can then ask other questions later on. So the two types of chat would be the automated chat or the bots and usually, you can tell it is a bot there will either be an icon or be called something, ours is just called ProTrainings bot.

Or it will be a real person and typically there, you will get the avatar or you get a picture of the person. Just remember if you are chatting with a real person, they are a real person and they are there to help you, so try and be as clear as you can, make sure that there are any questions you have, you answer them clearly. And if you're actually on a website, say be on someone's store and you have a facility to just log in, if you wanna get better answers out of chat systems, it is always best to be logged in to that company's website when you do it. Because if you are logged in to the site while you are on the chat, they will be able to help you further because they can see your account settings much, much easier.

Learning Outcomes:
  • EDSQ Unit 3 LO 9.1