Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Valerie Weil works as a customer care specialist in e-care at Comcast in North Fayette. She uses live chat to help customers solve their computer problems.

Valerie Weil helps Chad with a cable outage at the same time she lets Paul know an upcoming Steelers game will indeed be broadcast in high definition. And she does it without speaking a word to either.

Ms. Weil is an "e-care" customer service specialist in Comcast's North Fayette call center, which a year-ago October started offering a "live chat" customer service option. Essentially the same as instant messaging, it lets users and customer service agents communicate back and forth on the Internet in real time.

The company now receives about 100 questions per day through live chat -- about 30 percent more than it does through e-mail, which it has offered for several years.

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"For e-mail, most customers assume that it will be a few hours. For people that really need that instant gratification, we see more people going the chat route," said Ricky Frazier Jr., a Comcast regional support manager.

Companies started experimenting with live chats to communicate with customers in the late 1990s, coinciding with the advent of e-commerce and instant messaging.

But just in the last few years has it really started to catch on, said Jack Aaronson, chief executive officer of New York consulting firm The Aaronson Group.

"It's still a novelty," he said, "but it's getting much more widespread."

Big companies such as Verizon Communications, Microsoft and Cingular also offer live chat customer service.

For tech-savvy consumers, said Mr. Aaronson, live chat not only offers immediacy not found in e-mail but also eliminates the possibility of "listening to bad music" while on hold.

Comcast said that a optional survey that users take after each chat shows an 85 percent customer satisfaction rate.

Ms. Weil, one of seven e-care specialists at the call center, said she gets a lot of positive feedback during the chats.

"There are so many people that are thrilled they are able to get a hold of someone and talk to them live without having to pick up the phone," she said.

But companies benefit, too, said Mr. Aaronson: Live chats can be more efficient than phone calls because each customer service agent can only handle one call at a time.

At Comcast, Ms. Weil usually handles two chats at once, and also answers e-mails when nobody is online to chat.

Mr. Aaronson said he's heard of some companies where their employees do as many as four or five customer chats simultaneously. But he warned that poor management of live chats can ruin a customer's experience.

Some companies, for example, only let their live chat agents use pre-scripted prompts, he said, leading to frustration when customers can't get their exact questions answered.

At Comcast, e-care specialists type their own responses, although Ms. Weil does use some preset prompts as shortcuts. The command "pm," for example, translates to "Good afternoon and thanks for contacting us through Comcast online chat! I'm Val. How may I be of assistance?"

To make sure that all of their e-care specialists are communicating well, Comcast puts them through two days of writing training before they do live chat.

"When you're on the phone with someone, they can hear the intonation in your voice," said Mr. Frazier. "With writing, you have to be more careful. You don't know how people will interpret it."