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Live chat has become a popular and powerful tool for customer service relations. Plenty of big businesses with brand names use live chat on their websites. However, live chat can be an excellent tool for small businesses as well.
Numbers just don’t lie. Millennials and over half of all customers say that they prefer live chat over phone calls or email.
In this guide, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about getting a chatbox set up and running on your site.
An example of a live chat box installed on Ahrefs, using Intercom. The software can be used to help answer any questions visitors may have and potentially onboard them into customers.
Why Your Business Should Have Live Chat
Live chat can be a very beneficial feature to have on your site and something that can improve your relations with visitors and customers. Think about your own past experiences on other websites. How many times have you found a live chat helpful? Below are some reasons why you would want to add a chatbox to your site.
1. Improves Conversion Rates
The proactive outreach that live chat offers is proven to help convert visitors into leads. If you have an online shop, this is an important step for generating more sales. Studies have shown that website visitors who use live chat are three times more likely to make a purchase. Just by reaching out and providing assistance, you can convert a visitor into a lead and hopefully into a customer. The instant connection that live chat provides helps visitors make up their mind. A member of the sales team can also help convince customers who are on the fence about purchasing. The possibilities are very tangible in this regard.
2. Handles Customer Questions Quickly & Efficiently
The average support agent can handle up to three chats at the same time. That means they can help three times as many customers as with a phone call or email. Indeed, live chat provides a much quicker interaction than these other forms of contact. Communication is made easier, faster, and more effective.
3. Gives You an Edge Against Your Competition
Utilizing live chat can also give you an edge against the competition. Less than ten percent of all websites currently use live chat. Not only can you provide better customer service with live chat, but you can captivate customers as well. Other businesses that haven’t integrated live chat won’t be able to compete and will lose customers to your superior service.
4. Qualifies Leads
Visitors on your site who initiate a live chat are often curious on whether or not your service/product is the right fit for them. You can use live chat to directly qualify your leads by providing them with immediate questions and answers.
5. Expands Market Reach
Last but not least, live chat can help you expand your market reach. Customers better trust doing business with companies that they can access easily. Merely having a website with an online shop isn’t enough to convince them to buy. However, with live chat, new visitors can make inquiries and subsequent purchases with a simple click. You may even start receiving questions and customers from across the globe.
6. Connects & Builds Trust
As mentioned before, live chats help cultivate interaction and improve the customer experience. These two factors also help build trust. Customers know that they can count on your business to provide help when they need it. When a customer is actively seeking answers and gets them, they will be grateful. They will also start to view your business as trustworthy.
Building trust and establishing customer loyalty can set the stage for your customer relations. If a prospect entered your site to buy or get information and had a positive experience, they are likely to return. When you put your customers first and provide instant help with live chat, they will remember that. In this way, you are strengthening the bond between your business and your customers. This is something that will provide for better and longer customer relationships.
7. Improves Your Information
It’s important to take note of what visitors are regularly inquiring about. If you find that visitors keep asking about price or policy, take that as an opportunity to update your site. Live chat is also a great way to get feedback. You can use this feedback constructively to fill any holes in information. All business can benefit from a little bit of customer perspective.
The ability to save and archive chats means that there will always be this information on file. Although a business may not discover an issue immediately, they still have the opportunity to do so. Pain points, as they are known, always exist. Utilizing live chat archives actively to find and correct any issues will help business improve their practices. Customers will also take note of your business’s capacity for change and appreciate it.
8. Increases Customer Satisfaction
Small business would seem to benefit more from live chats. Not only do business obtain more proximity to customers, but they can maintain it more easily. Regardless of the amount of staff they have, using live chat will help keep customers happy. Studies have shown that websites with live chat have a higher satisfaction rate. That means more visitors leave delighted.
A higher satisfaction rate connects directly to a faster problem resolution time. Plenty of businesses have training documents or videos to help customers navigate their sites. Agents can provide these to users to lessen their troubleshooting time. Additionally, screen sharing abilities will allow agents to get to the root of the problem. These kinds of capabilities aren’t possible with basic phoning.
How to Add Live Chat on Your Website
Don’t worry, physically integrating live chat into your website isn’t as difficult as you might think. In fact, most live chat providers have made the process streamlined. While some use only code, others prefer widgets. It all depends on your website and what you prefer to use.
Live Chat is one of the most popular chat boxes on the market and offers a variety of features.
LiveChat, for example, has a very straightforward installation process.
- First, you need to sign up for the service. If you want to go for a test-drive, there is a thirty-day trial available.
- Sign into your account and enter your Settings page. Under settings find Channels then Chat widget.
- Click and copy the code that this page provides.
- Paste that same code into your website’s CSS before the </body> tag.
- Refresh the page. If the code has been added successfully, you should see the live chat widget at the bottom of the page.
However, if your site is on a platform like WordPress, BigCommerce or Shopify, you’ll have to follow some different steps. The same goes for third-party integrations. However, LiveChat has you covered. Their website includes easy to follow tutorials for installations of all kinds. Simply do a bit of digging to find the necessary procedure for your site.
Once you’ve installed your live chat, be sure to customize it to your site to optimize the experience. Visitors will feel less awkward using the chat if it fits in well with the rest of the site. Also, remember to adjust your automatic chat invites and greetings. These should be enough to prompt a response, but not annoy visitors. Finally, learn everything you can about the features to maximize their effectiveness.
Tips & Tricks On How to Use Your Live Chat
Now that you’re all clued up on live chat and how it can help your business, there are plenty of things to keep in mind. Live chat isn’t a magic spell. Just placing it on your site won’t boost your sales and service immediately. You’ll need to be smart about your chat settings, in order to, truly improve the user experience. Remember that sometimes it’ll be a case of trial and error.
Chatbox placement
One of the most important things to consider is where to put your chat box. While the homepage is usually the most visited page, it may not be the ideal place. Again, we don’t want to interrupt the user experience. This is doubly true if they are not yet dealing with comprehensive information. Consider placing a chat box on your pricing page and contact page.
These pages are likely to be where visitors will have the most questions. So jumping in to help here will definitely be of interest you. If your business offers a trial service, add the live chat option on that page too. Visitors may be more likely to start a free trial when they see it comes from a user-friendly business. If they are satisfied with the trial, that may also be the same reason they continue to pay for the service.
While using canned messages, or pre-programmed messages, can help be careful not to overuse them. The goal of using live chat is to give the customer experience a personal touch. If customers feel bombarded with messages from a robot, they won’t appreciate it. Canned messages can be helpful but in small doses. Think about which pages of your website would benefit from them.
Content and timing
Programming chatbot interactions is a complex process and it’s essential that you invest some time and effort into doing it right. You can either hire a high-quality writer to plan your interactions properly or have a live human being to do the communication for you.
When agents are online, in your business working hours, they are free to help. Sending a prompt that shows that agents are online will get a better response. Sometimes just the comfort of knowing help is there is adds a lot to the customer experience. If visitors do have questions, they will be more likely to reach out.
While there is no ‘perfect’ time frame for prompting a chat, you may way to try different approaches. Generally, the more time a user spends on a page the more questions they may have. Remember that visitors want their lives simplified. Don’t over complicate the conversation. Use simple greetings to initiate the conversation.
Pay attention to metrics
There is also the tracking and analytics side of live chat. Not only can you keep conversations, but you can also measure how many visitors are engaging in them. Most services allow you to see how many chat requests are ignored or accepted. This information will help you improve your live chat services. Moreover, it can help your agents some insight into their service, as well.
Tracking features will also help you improve your site as a whole. With these features, you can measure traffic to see where visitors are coming from. Information like this can help you customize the user experience. Not to mention, you’ll be able to devise better marketing strategies with this information at your fingertips. These tools help you grow and improve your online service as a whole.
Conclusion
In short, there are plenty of positive results that can come from adding live chat to your website. The most important being that you can improve your customer relations. Better customer relations cultivate customer loyalty. All businesses, especially small businesses, rely on loyal customers. When you deliver, you will earn and keep your customer’s trust.
Analyzing your website and filling in any gaps in information is a necessary byproduct of live chat. Showing your customer base that you are willing to change and improve will take you far. No business is perfect, but showing you can grow sets you apart from the rest. This propensity for change will also help build customer trust. Customers will see you as being on their side and not just looking for financial gains.
However, there are plenty of financial gains to be made with live chat. The reality is that this online interaction is what helps turn visitors into leads. That subtle distinction can be what makes or breaks a sale. If a visitor is pondering a purchase and then gets prompted with a chat, their acceptance of that chat can be the deciding factor. Plenty of businesses have increased their sales by implementing live chat.
Besides increasing sales, you can cut your costs. Consider lower phone bills and fewer agents needed for customer service. If customers know they can use live chat, they will prefer it over long, drawn-out phone calls. That means fewer telephones ringing, but more customers getting help. Agents will be able to help more than one customer at a time and reduce their wait time.
Thus, there are plenty of upsides that can come from adding live chat to your website. For smaller business, improving customer relationships and the customer experience will pay off in a huge way. Diminishing costs on the way there is an added bonus. Furthermore, increasing sales will be the most important thing your company can gain from live chats. So, please don’t put it off any longer.
Your customers will be happier and will trust your company more. Chances are you will also be a step ahead of your competitors, which is a plus. Take some time to evaluate companies that offer live chat services and see which is most appealing to you. Evaluate your current website and decide how you can integrate live chat into it. Don’t take too long deciding as the internet waits for no one!
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