By JODY DODSON - Internet Week

Web merchants better wake up. Less than 1 percent of e-businesses offer any form of real-time customer service, and 42 percent take four or more days to respond to customer e-mails, according to a study by Andersen Consulting.

There's nothing more annoying than trying to spend money and not having someone around to help. This is exactly how the people visiting your site feel. They want service--and they will happily pay for it. So what's the secret to answering questions in real time, closing more transactions and building stronger relationships with customers?

It isn't complicated. Internet customer service software built on chat technology has been around for years. For some strange reason, most companies conducting business over the Web are still shy about embracing chat.

The premise is simple. Your most valuable customers are probably the ones who use the Internet regularly. Not surprisingly, these are the same people who already use instant messaging to converse with family and friends on a regular basis.

E-businesses that sell to consumers need to begin leveraging chat as a real-time customer service feature directly in their Web sites.

Fortunately, today's chat-based customer service tools are easy to deploy. There's no hardware or software to install. You simply copy and paste a line of code into your Web page and an icon appears on your site that says: Click here for live chat support. Depending on the size of your daily customer traffic and/or the amount of customer service requests, you assign the incoming chat conversations to one or more customer service agents. The inquiries can be routed to in-house agents or outside agencies. The entire system can be implemented in less than 24 hours.

Some of these systems include enhanced push and Voice over IP. Enhanced push features let service reps deliver images, hyperlinks or even entire Web pages directly to customers who initiate a chat session. VOIP lets customers converse with a service representative without ever picking up their phone.

According to Andersen Consulting, 62 percent of the Internet's consumers say that if live, online customer service was available, they'd spend more money. So what are you waiting for? The time is right to add live online customer service to your e-business site.