A firm providing outsourced online chat services to agents has announced a 157% increase in turnover during the last year, amid growing demand.

Chat Heroes was launched in 2015 by Paul Lawton, who said that while his firm provides live web chat services for a number of businesses, over half are for sales and letting agents.

He said that his customers are typically looking for ways to engage with their website visitors on a one to one basis, but do not have the traffic or internal resources to man live chat operations 85 hours a week.

Lawton said: “Live chat is the perfect first-step communication for customers visiting a website and our trained team offer immediate information to keep a customer interested and engaged.

“A lead is with the business owner in less than 100 seconds on any device.

“One of the biggest problems facing traditional agents is the rise of the online-only estate agents and we offer a multi-faceted tool to add to the marketing and communication mix of high-street agents and assist greatly in the digital fightback.

“It is almost expected of businesses now to offer a live chat option but we completely understand the demands this places on resources.

“Our initial specialism in the property industry has grown to cover many different areas and we are now looking to expand further with new teams of six members each to support recent contract wins.”

Current clients include Castledene Group.