Live chat is an indispensable online customer support tool that brings great results. There are many statistics that prove this point right and if these tools weren’t a valuable asset to companies, they wouldn’t be used so much in modern business.
Providing quality customer support online can be tricky, which is why organizations try to get their hands on as many customer support tools as possible. You might say that live chat is at the top of the chain of online support, and it offers many benefits that emails or phone lack. This is why an increasing number of websites are implementing live chat to utilize its full potential.
Still, if you add live chat to a website, you won’t get instant results. Even if you find the best chat service for your website needs, it doesn’t guarantee you anything. It’s important to set it up correctly and use it the right way to be able to tap into its power.
With that in mind, here are the five steps you need to take to get the most out of your live chat.
1. Place it in the Right Place
The first thing you need to worry about is where you should put your live chat help. Naturally, the essential location is the homepage of your website, but there are many other locations where it can be useful and where people will click on it to start communicating with your business.
Given the fact that most business organizations market themselves online through multiple channels, it’s important that you follow up your online presence on different platforms with live chat as well. For example, if you advertise a lot on social media, you should make sure to implement live chat there if possible, or simply put, links that lead to your online support.
If you have a blog, include your live chat software there as well. This is how you will increase the chances of people contacting you and starting conversations that could lead to sales, establishing connections and overall great experience for visitors.
2. Train/hire Quality Agents
A lot of organizations make the terrible mistake of thinking that anyone can be a live chat agent. In most cases, they put someone who is already working for them to do this part time. This is not the right way to go as live chat agents need to have the right set of skills including communication, empathy, the ability to relate to someone and patience.
To get the most out of your live chat, you will need capable people operating live support and not just random people from your company. A capable live chat agent can simultaneously talk to 10 people. This is why it’s better to pay for training or hire someone with experience – it will take a long time before you need to hire more people to do this.
Not only will a single agent be able to handle more customers, but he or she will also be better at engaging customers and behaving correctly when talking to them. When a live chat agent cares, it shows and customers like to feel appreciated and taken care of.
3. Automated Live Chat – Proactive Chat
One of the features that you should look to have in your live chat tool is automated pop-ups. Simply put, there are tools that can be set to pop up on a visitor’s screen after a certain condition has been met.
For example, you can set the chat box to appear on the screen after the visitor has spent some time on your website. On the other hand, you can make it come out when someone is unable to perform an action or when that person is not progressing anywhere from a certain page or step in their buying process.
When the chat box appears at the corner of a visitor’s screen they should be greeted with a message that invites that person to have a chat. This is how a business shows that it’s willing to help people and that its staff is at their disposal.
Don’t abuse proactive chat and start bothering visitors by constantly sending pop-up chat boxes that have random, irrelevant invitations. It’s better to send fewer invitations, but make them meaningful and, through them, offer help for the problems your visitors are facing.
4 .Greeting Messages
When your live chat appears, it’s a good idea to create greeting messages that will be displayed to potential customers. This first message the visitors see can determine whether they decide to engage in a conversation with your live chat agents or not.
It’s good to have a warm and almost neutral tone, letting people know that you are here for them and ready to help in case they encounter problems. Making a good first impression is essential, because the customers will not only be open towards chatting, but they will also think more of your whole organization.
Some typical examples of live chat greeting messages are “Hi there, can I help you with something?”, or “If you need any help, feel free to talk to us” and so on.
5. Activate Real-Time Tracking
This is a very useful feature which allows agents to see who is on the website in real-time, what page they are on, how long they are staying on a page, their location, IP address and some even have trackers that show you if that person has visited your site in the past and what they did, or bought from your site.
All of this information can be of great value to live chat agents. First of all, they will be able to identify which visitors are in need of most help and then manually send them an invitation to chat and offer them help. Second of all, by knowing more about the person they are talking to, they will be able to adjust their approach and make their answers more relevant.
Conclusion
In the end, remember to avoid things such as live chat bots, as they can easily get recognized by customers. No matter how good you might think that your live chat bot is, it’s simply not human and people will notice. Live chat is about person-to-person interaction and this is how it should be.
If you have customers who speak different languages, the best option is to find agents who are familiar with those languages, as using Google Translate is a big no-no. Good luck in curating your customer support with live chat. Consider the things we’ve mentioned today and you will get better results with your live support.
