How to Successfully Provide Live Chat Support on Your Website
If you are looking to provide Live Chat support on your website or open to the idea of setting one up, this will help you get started. There are of course a number of ways to convert more website visitors into leads and customers and this is certainly one of the useful options out there that is worth considering.
Depending on your type of local business and the resources you have in place, providing Live Chat on your website may not necessarily be suitable. But if it’s something that you can accommodate into your business, then you should find this information valuable.
Besides, if you run an advertising campaign to drive visitors to your website or landing webpage, adding a Live Chat system into the mix (if you can accommodate it) can as an added bonus even help towards reducing your bounce rate.
Be Quick in Your Responses
The fact is people like Live Chat as it offers a convenient and instant way to get in touch live with a real person for FREE!. You must have the right chat Agents and infrastructure in place in order to provide quick immediate responses. And keep your replies as brief as possible (without fluff) for quick time-effective interactions with people.
Have Capable Agents in Place
A key part of Live Chat’s ability to increase website conversion rate is to have people in place who are knowledgeable about your product or service. Apart from that, you need fluent communicators who can solve customer queries effectively. So make sure your Agents are well trained. If you are outsourcing chat Agents, then provide them with knowledge base and FAQ content for dealing with common questions.
Doing Live Chat In-House
Using existing employees as chat Agents is of course a way of providing Live Chat support in-house. The good thing is you or your existing staff members are already knowledgeable about your offers. Therefore, if you already have resources in place internally to provide the service yourself, why not take advantage? After all, the end result is you will be regularly getting more customers.
Your staff can operate your chat service on a rotational basis. For example, have someone operate your chat system for 2 hours at a time. Alternatively, have someone doing the job full-time. Just make sure that whoever is the chat Agent on duty is fully dedicated without getting distracted with other tasks. As lack of responses or quick replies to Live Chat enquiries will obviously have a negative impact on your business.
Hiring Outsourcers For The Task
You may simply outsource your Live Chat service. This is a great option if you don’t already have employees available to use as Agents or you are too busy to do it yourself in-house. It’s very affordable. But more importantly, the ongoing sales revenue you will gain is far greater than the low cost of outsourcing. Imagine highly multiplying your sales.
Besides, a hired chat Agent will be focused on this one task. They won’t get distracted with other tasks that employees may possibly experience. If you choose to go down this route, remember to provide your outsourced Agents with knowledge base and FAQ for solving common customer questions. Sometimes an outsourced Agent cannot answer a question during a Live Chat. What happens then? No problem. They take a message on your behalf and forward it to you for a reply.
Include Screen Notification Feature
Your website chat system should include notification feature. This will automatically notify you on your computer screen when receiving new Live Chat enquiries. You can therefore avoid missing out on customers.
Maximise The Live Chat Experience
Focusing on conversion is always important. The point is you need to test, test and keep testing your chat service! It could be about level of response rate, quantity of leads captured daily, levels of sales per day and so forth. Find out what’s working or not for ongoing improvements. Look for emerging patterns such as what common questions keep coming up. Then based on your findings, make necessary ongoing improvements.
Be Aware of Peak Traffic Times
Not many businesses will be able to employ or provide 24-hour a day, seven days a week Live Chat support. Therefore, you need to be aware of when traffic peaks on your website in order to effectively allocate your resources. Knowing this will allow you to have someone dedicated in place during peak times.
Offer Warm & Friendly Chats
Your chat service should be a warm, friendly and great way to help you connect with your customers. So, use the opportunity of being in this situation to not only build excellent rapport with people, but go the extra mile to meet their needs. As a result, satisfied customers will come back to you for repeat business or give you referrals.
Provide ‘Offline Mode’ Contact Form
When you are unavailable for website Live Chat support service, turn your chat box into offline mode. Make sure your chat box has a contact form. People are then allowed to leave messages with their contact details (name, email etc). So you are still able to capture leads (from your website) when your Live Chat service is offline.
Make Live Chat Accessible on Mobile
These days with many people visiting websites on their mobile phones, your chat system must be accessible on mobile devices. If not, you’ll miss out on a lot of chat enquiries from smartphone users. Besides, if you are outgoing and would like to respond to Live Chat enquiries (while on the go), ensure you can do this via your smartphone. As this provides the flexibility to be away from your desktop computer and still access your chat system. The point is you and your website visitors should have access to your Live Chat feature via mobile devices.
Conclusion
Assuming having a Live Chat system on your website is something of interest to you and you can actually accommodate this into your business, here are 3 recommended platforms you can use to set this system up:
livechat.com
chaport.com
zendesk.co.uk
The above websites all provide high quality Live Chat support systems, but of course you can always do some research to find out about some other quality chat platform systems that you may want to consider. And by clicking the link here, you will also learn further information about reducing bounce rate on your website to increase conversion rate and drive in more customers.