The Warm Website Initiative is much about serving the visitor at the moment they are on the website. In order to be able to do that, you will need to have your staff manning the website. There is, however, a way to go beyond the resource limits of your own staff by letting your business partners be a part of your website, creating a "virtual company" with a much larger footprint!

What? Shall we have external people working inside our own website?? No Way!

Well, thinking about it, we already invite our partners to be a part of our booth at the Internet World Expo and other trade shows. They even have our shirts. Only the name tags are a bit different, and they are allowed to have their logos above their computers...

The thing is that we can do exactly the same on the web, by embedding the possibility to have a live chat with the partner into the partner directory, their case studies, blog postings and their product information. That will make your company or organization appear much better and larger, from the visitor perspective. Also, your partners will be happy to get in contact with warm leads, without having to do anything!
Imagine having some 200 partners available inside www.episerver.com, instead of the single inside sales assistant manning the site today.

Alibaba.com is a very good example, putting thousands of Chinese manufacturers at your fingertips!

Some manufacturers are online, some offline, but you are presented with the option to leave a message if the manufacturer of your choice is offline.

Taking this technology into a government site can save you from trying to find the right person through the phone. Just navigate to the section covering your particular question and see if there is someone available to assist you! Or search the site with the keywords.

On the back end of the websites there is a need to use something that connects the staff (and your partners) to the web pages. Luckily, there are several options to solve this:

• You can use your regular Microsoft Messenger!
  Naturally there is a need for something that remove the requirement for the visitors to use Messenger, they shall just use a chat function embedded into a regular web page. The staff and the partners on manning the site should use their regular MS Messenger.
  (We at the EPiServer Research Team are developing a chat connector that uses Jabber technology as a proxy, connecting a web based chat system (inside EPiServer) with Microsoft Messenger and most other messaging clients except Skype).
  
• You can use Skype!
  (Our first attempt was based on Skype, see http://r.ep.se/projects/EPiServer_Webchat/ but since we do not have full control of the traffic, my developers are now more leaning towards MS Messenger/Jabber.. Sad, since Skype is my definite favorite and is broadly in use inside EPiServer AB).
  
• You can use NTRsupport
  (We use NRT ourselves at www.episerver.com to enable live chat functionality into the website. Based on either an installed client program or a webpage. Can escalate the chat into screen sharing/instant demo).
  
• You can use Humanclick

You can also use any other of the hundreds of chat systems out there but the beauty of using something like MS Messenger is that it makes it very easy to invoke your partners. They do not have to do anything extra (except giving you their MSM IDs). Their MS Messenger presence status will be detected by the chat connector.

Some days ago I was contacted through Skype by a customer using the chat function at our http://r.ep.se site when I was checking the mail.
I had almost forgotten about the old chat experiment but it still worked.

And it still does!

You are welcome to have a chat with me through my calendar page, http://r.ep.se/MySite/Mikael_Runhem/Mikes_calendar/

Catch me if you can :-)

Mikael Runhem, EPiServer AB

PS: At EPiServer Research, we are working on providing EPiServer customers that wants to go the Warm Website way with a technology platform that connects the web with the MS Messenger and the CRM (so that chat conversations can be stored insite the CRM etc.). We are also working with our EPiMore partners in order to plug their technology into the WWi channels. DS