# Live Chat 
source: https://developer.mastercard.com/blog/live-chat/index.md

Authors: Andrew Cataldo. On August 22nd 2019, Mastercard Developers introduced Live Chat to better support our customers. Users are now able to engage in real-time conversations, with specialized API agents, for any type of integration questions. Truth be told, I am excited about this one. It is no secret that chat has quickly become industry standard for providing support. It offers the opportunity for a more seamless interaction versus traditional support channels. It can also resolve issues in a fraction of the time. The catch is, not all chats are created equally. Despite its ubiquity, experiences with chat can range from a speedy success to a flat-out dead end. So, how do we ensure that our take on chat ends up on the right side of the conversation? For a touch of background, the chat arena has two primary players - live agents and chat bots. Live agents are real support representatives, capable of having dynamic conversations, but are subject to agent availability and training. Whereas chat bots are programmatic scripts, capable of responding to predetermined questions, but they are always available. As you can imagine, each are beholden to their own set of superlatives and challenges. As a platform that strives for self-service, and that offers API's aimed at automation, you may be asking why we didn't use a chat bot. And the bottom line is - customer experience. One of the cornerstones of a positive support experience is timeliness. Consumers have become accustom to speed, and expect it not only in their time to integration, but in the company's rate of response. Both chat solutions have the ability to enable speed, but a faster pace means nothing without a quality resolution. Across 400 consumers and 100 businesses, 95% of customers said they value thorough, high-quality support more than speed. Our approach to delivering on both fronts is through live chat. We believe an agent with subject matter expertise, on both APIs and our company, is better suited to provide a well-rounded resolution than a static bot. Even if we can't answer a question on the spot, we can put you on the path to finding it. But before any conversations can be had, we needed to get the build right. We needed to solve for the dead-end possibility; that annoying experience of seeing chat on a site only to be put into an endless queue, or even worse, not be answered at all. By customizing the initialization of chat on our site's front end, we were able to ping our support application to retrieve an agent's availability. So, before a user logs in or begins a chat, they are seeing real time availability. If an agent is online, they will see a 'Chat Now' button. If an agent is busy or offline, they will see a 'Get Help' button. Regardless of which button is shown, we are able to then trigger an API call to generate a support ticket with that user's information and questions. As with most endeavors though, our solution is only as good as the people behind it. With a wide variety of APIs on our platform, it was essential that we aligned chat users with the right people. To do so, we started by staffing a team filled with general API experts; each team member possessing an in-depth knowledge of the technology and our platform. Then we honed it in. Based on an agent's area of expertise, they are staffed against a set of APIs. To a customer, the chat experience remains the same, but behind the scenes, it is being routed to the most qualified person for that conversation. If you were to start a chat with us on, for example, an MDES documentation page, the agent on the other end of that chat would be an MDES pro. If for some reason the topic changes, and is beyond an agent's scope, they can instantly transfer the chat to another agent with the requisite skill set. This methodology allows us to emulate the specificity of a chat bot, without losing out on the human dynamics that make a customer feel understood. All of these tactics and stats only help to say what most of us feel in our gut -- when things go wrong, we want someone on our side. We want to be seen as individuals, with individual problems, being offered individual solutions. Live chat is our way of doing just that.