What is Live Chat?
Live Chat is a web service that allows businesses to communicate, or “chat,” in real-time with visitors on their website. Live Chat applications are commonly used to provide immediate customer support and information to clients and customers. The chat system reports on every page the user is on or has visited, in order for your team to better serve their questions.
What are the benefits of having a Live Chat on a website?
- It can increase conversions. Implementing a live chat will allow your website to convert leads more easily because you can respond at their exact time of need.
- It’s personalized. Live chat provides potential customers with answers to their questions in a 1-on-1 setting, so they get individualized attention.
- It happens in real-time. Having a live chat eliminates wait times for your customers when they have a question. Rather than waiting for a contact form submission to be answered, they can chat with a customer service representative right away.
- It improves customer service. Live chat provides your existing customers with a new customer service opportunity.
What’s involved in setting up Live Chat?
- The design of a Live Chat feature can be tailored to the look & feel of your website, matching colors & styles so it integrates well with your branding.
- Once we have the design approved, implementing live chat is as easy as putting an embed code within the global template of your website so it shows up on every page.
- Live Chat features have settings so that the chat box can appear as desired (from footer, from sidebar, open on demand, etc.)
- Finally, we’ll also need to set-up your Live Chat account, create user roles and manage your settings.
How do we use Live Chat?
- Your team should assign people to be active responders within the Live Chat platform during regular business hours. We’ve had clients assign certain people to the tool on specific days of the week, or for certain hours during the day.
- If no sales person is available to man the tool, the chat will turn into a simple form or chat bot to capture leads. These form submissions get submitted to the website the same way a contact form would.
- Your sales team can be as proactive as they like with the live chat – it has applications for most platforms your sales team would be on (Desktop, Mobile).
What goes into selecting a Live Chat tool?
There are several Live Chat tools that we use on our websites – third-party systems like ZenDesk or Olark, for instance. However, there are certain factors that go into our recommendation, including:
- What CRM our client is using
- The number of contacts who’ll need log-ins to the program
- Specific features requested by the client (reporting, chatbots, translations, etc.)
After a brief set-up procedure and some customer service/sales team training, Live Chat can be a great opportunity to continue communications with your customers and provide them with another company touchpoint. Give it a try!