Online chat is a better option compared to other customer service strategies like an email exchange or a personalized phone call. For live chat, some essential criteria have to be considered. First, it is important to ensure that the client or the user is registered on the company's website as all chat sessions would originate from the website of the company. Second, it is also important to know that whether inquiries being received are quick to answer or are detailed inquiries in order to continue with at least three chat sessions at a time. Third, the basic requirement is to have an operator during live chat sessions. Due to live chat sessions, a knowledge base of prepared responses gets build up which benefits in responding to customers faster and re-type the same answer, and thus there is a consistent communication between the company and customer. Read more at: http://managementhelp.org/blogs/customer-service/2010/06/04/customer-service-strategies-live-chat/ 

Unlike other retailers, Nordstrom (a fashion speciality retailer), wanted to learn more about its customers like how many came through the doors, how many were repeat visitors. The company started testing new technology that allowed it to track customers' movements by following the Wi-Fi signals from their smart phones. Nordstrom's experiment is part of a movement by retailers to gather data about in-store shoppers' behavior and moods, using video surveillance and signals from their cell phones and apps to get information as varied as their gender, how many minutes they spend in the candy aisle and how long they look at merchandise before buying it. If a consumer looks for Wi-Fi network, a store that offers Wi-Fi can pinpoint where that particular shopper can go and get Wi-Fi connection within a 10-foot radius. Stores can also recognize returning shoppers as mobile devices send unique identification codes when they search for networks. This means stores can now tell how repeat customers behave and the average time between visits. Read more at-http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/business/attention-shopper-stores-are-tracking-your-cell.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0/

During 2013 December, Amazon launched Kinesis. It is a service for real-time processing of streaming data. Kinesis is designed to capture small records, which in turn forms huge amount of backend data. Amazon wanted to be able to capture all of that data, aggregate it, and put it into its AWS cloud storage service (S3), so that they could look at it at a later stage. Waite, General Manager of Data Services, AWS, said “This enables us to scale the metering service to new limits and give alerts in real time”.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/why-amazon-created-aws-kinesis-its-live-data-processing-service/