Important Considerations for Live Chat
Live Chat has been a commonly increasing element websites have incorporated. It may seem like a simple add-on to a website as there are many plug-ins and providers out there, but there are a number of factors you want to consider when either building the live chat option from scratch or when selecting a vendor.
A recent study by Bold Software, one the main providers of Live Chat solutions, concluded that 38% of users making online purchases interacted with a live chat as published on emarkerter.com so doing this well will certainly payoff.
Offer Support — Don’t Overwhelm
A critical pieces of making live chat work is to ensure that this is a resource for the customers and not another attempt to force them to buy your service. Be judicious about the pages in which the live chat shows up and keep it minimized with friendly text in the title bar saying something like ‘How can we help you?’ The landing page is always an important page for most sites to have the live chat and it’s also useful on product pages for e-commerce sites or the quotes and services sections for other products.
The chat shouldn’t pop-up immediately either, give the user some time to browse through your site before concluding that they may want support. It’s best to give it 30 seconds before popping up a chat box and offering support.
Email Transcript
Make sure the service you use allows you to email a transcript to your customer when the chat completes. Answering questions and responding to costumer considerations are a critical reason the chat box has become so popular. Customers don’t necessarily remember everything they spoke about so a transcript is a great point of reference for customers to easily revisit the conversation they just had.
Be a Conduit for Communication
The whole purpose of live chat is to make it quick and easy to have any question you have answered so the ability to get a conversation going shouldn’t require much. For smaller organizations with simple products or services, you can easily have the chat open up directly with a question ‘How can we help you?’ But for more complex services or larger organizations a simple form requesting a name, email address, and a drop down menu can be enough. Make sure the email entry is optional as the main purpose of the chat is to offer customer service and people are inherently resistant to give out their email address these days.
Offline messaging
Be clear to your customers if you are online or not. When offline, the chat should be minimized your offline status should be seen on the title bar of the chat. If a user decides to open up the chat regardless, greet them with an option to send you any questions they have and let them know when to expect a response.
Include a phone number
This will vary depending on your business intentions. The whole purpose of the chat option may be to lower the volume of phone calls. Regardless the case, if your customer is finding sufficient support chatting with the customer service representative, they will not find it necessary to call in and if for whatever reason they want to call in, having the number accessible reduces frustration in searching the site for a phone number. People choose to engage in a chat to interact with your organization. Human interactions are still the most effective touchpoint to closing a sale. So if you have customers looking for more direct engagement, make it easy for them to have that interaction!
Provide Customer Support Professionals with User Data
Make sure the service you choose allows your representatives to see critical user data. This could be as thorough as a full history of your customers purchase history or the pages they currently visited. This information can be the difference maker allowing your representatives to provide a personal experience.
Beyond Technology
Lastly, the effectiveness of incorporating the Live Chat option is not going to be limited to design and features, but also to the training of your representatives. Extraordinary customer service in technology relies on knowing your customers needs and leading them through an intuitive experience, this holds just as true for any sort of live interaction, even if it’s through a website. Many vendors offer great guidelines, insights, and support for the human element and I strongly advise taking that in to account when choosing your path.
It will be exciting to see in the couple of years how live chat continues to develop on webpages, especially with the new capabilities being introduced through AI and chat experiences.
