Bankwest is running a trial where 40 of its home loan and business bankers are participating in live chat sessions with customers visiting the bank's website.Bankwest uses a service from Liveperson to track a customer's website movements. Based on a series of pre-determined rules (such as if someone seems to stall when filling out a home loan application), the service automatically offer website visitors a live chat with a bank staffer. Commonwealth Bank, ANZ and NAB's UBank also use the system.Jane Muirsmith, head of online for Bankwest's retail bank, said, at the Cebit computing conference in Sydney, that a trial of Liveperson last year across three products exceeded targets in terms of conversions (browsing turning into sales) and customer satisfaction. Liveperson has now been extended to all products on the bank's website."We know when they've hit a brick wall and we can offer to help them," she said, adding that an additional benefit was that a chat session allowed a bundle of products to be offered to a customer, depending on their needs. Although the bank had trialled a customer-initiated chat service, it found that customers wanted to talk about their particular financial situation, which was not the purpose of the chat service, according to Muirsmith. Rob LoCascio, the founder and CEO of Liveperson, who is visiting Australia, said that, typically, only one to two per cent of people visiting a website would purchase a product or service, but claimed 25 per cent of chat sessions turned into a sale. "The top 15 banks in the world are our customers," he said. Liveperson is a hosted service and charges per user, per month, and, depending on the complexity of the application, charges range from $2, for the simplest small business chat service, to $2,000 a month for more complex implementations.