Live chat is a popular messaging tool. It enables existing and potential customers to communicate with your business online, that is, in real-time through your website. Whenever a client is at a loss, they can simply contact you via chat and ask for help. If you are online, the client should receive a response within a minute or two. So, speed is one of the key factors why chats are popular among customers.
If you are active in the chat, you increase the chance that the person in question will buy from you. But how do you choose the best one? Here are some tips from Yellow Systems software development company to help you choose the right tool for you.
Table of Contents
Define Goals And Prepare Processes
Before choosing an online chat, consider what you expect from it. Define your goals and priorities and prepare processes, at least initially, for typical situations.
Decide how much time you can spend on live chat and whether there is someone in the company who will manage it (will you have one operator or several?). Also, think about what will happen if this colleague gets sick or is on vacation.
Last but not least, think about how you will evaluate everything and where you will record the feedback received from customers. Alternatively, what are the next steps to take after the chat is over?
The most common and biggest mistake is inattention. A chat will never serve you well if you don’t invest enough time, energy, and care into it.
Want A Live Chat? Dedicate Yourself To It
If you choose to host a chat on your site, be aware that it will need to be taken care of. Backlog of offline pending customer requests won’t make your job easier and likely won’t help drive more orders.
You must be where your customers are. You need to respond quickly and skillfully, which means you need someone to lead your chat. Ideally, a person is a specialist who will be available to clients and will be at hand at any time if someone needs help.
If you want to provide a high level of communication with customers in real-time, you will need to put more effort into a chat than using other communication channels. But in this case, try to keep a balance between your effort and value. Either way, don’t underestimate it.
Use The Full Potential Of Live Chat
You can use a chat as a powerful marketing tool. A chat offers you countless benefits and business opportunities:
- You give customers another way to contact you – quickly and easily.
- Live chat on the web looks authentic – there are real people behind it.
- It promotes the good name of your brand.
- A chat can also be a competitive advantage.
- With live chat, you can get important reviews.
- You can gather customer contacts into a database for mailing lists and the like.
- It is an easy way to proactively reach customers, inform them about discounts and special offers, and offer your help.
Win the Competition
Before you start choosing a live chat, carefully study the competition. For example, prepare an Excel file in which you mark all of your biggest competitors.
Go through their websites and mark the knowledge about their chats in the table. This can not only help you make a choice, but most importantly, you can be one step ahead of the competition. Here is what to look for:
- Does the rival use live chat?
- How and when are they online?
- Do they really respond to chat requests?
- What chat app do they use?
- Do they have active customer outreach?
- Will they let you leave a message even if they’re offline?
- Does the chat also work on mobile?
Once you have completed your competition analysis, you can begin to analyze the relevant instruments.
Choose Your Chat
Choosing the best solution for you and your company is very individual and depends on several factors:
- How big is your business and how much traffic are you getting?
- How busy is your support team?
- How many people will have access to the chat?
- How much do you want to invest in the instrument?
- Do you just need a basic chat or do you want something more advanced? Do you prefer the USA application or will it be easy for you to get acquainted with a foreign instrument?
You should know the answers to all these questions. This will greatly help you in making decisions and choosing the most suitable application.
Features That Should Not Be Missing
In the same way that you buy a new car with basic equipment, certain features should be available in the chat.
- Ability to open multiple chats at the same time.
- Connecting various plugins and third-party applications.
- Color customization of the chat widget to match the company design.
- Setting online and offline status.
- Statistics and similar output with important data.
- Automatic proactive customer outreach.
- Adding a photo (avatar) of the operator in the chat.
- Fast support in the language you speak.
- Easy setup and operation.
- Ability to manage a chat on PC, tablet, and phone.
- New chat notification.
Embed a Chat On The Website
Embedding live chat on your site is usually easy. In most cases, you will receive a special implementation code from your online chat provider. This code then just needs to be pasted into the footer of your website.
Extra Tip
After you’ve embedded a chat popup on your website, test how it will appear to your customers in an anonymous browser window. You will prevent the chat from being covered by a cookie bar, etc.
