If you’ve not invested in live chat for your website, you’re potentially missing out on a huge opportunity to win more opportunities or improve customer service by answering questions directly online.

Even if you have invested in live chat, how do you know it’s working the way you want? And are you getting the results you want?

At Face For Business, we manage live chat for hundreds of customers who wanted to win more online and improve their reputation with customers.

Here we give you the insights of our expertise to help you make live chat work for yourself.

Just before we start, when we say “live chat”, this isn’t the same as a chatbot. Live chat is much more personal and puts real people behind the online experience to interact in a human way with your customers.

What do you want to achieve?

The most important thing to understand when investing in live chat – or anything for your business – is what you want to achieve.

Using live chat usually falls into three categories when it comes to goals that businesses want to achieve:

– Improve Customer Service

If you want your website to be an extension of your customer service team, then live chat can help you provide useful information directly to customers and answer questions for them while they’re browsing your site.

– Increase Conversion Rates

Whether you’re selling directly to consumers on your website or using your website to gather customer information, an interactive live chat can help you increase conversion rates by actively engaging with customers while they’re on your site and more likely to buy.

For B2B (or even solicitor offices and estate agents), you can use an outsourced live chat to gather customer information for future marketing efforts or book meetings and calls directly with prospects.

– Direct Customers to The Right Information

If you use your website as an information hub for your products and services, it can sometimes be difficult for customers to navigate to the information they need (especially if they’ve never been on your site before).

Using live chat, you can quickly direct customers to the information they need to answer a question or solve a problem.

Obviously, outsourced live chat can be used for multiple purposes, but you’ll usually fit into one of these categories.

Set your baseline

Once you understand your goals for live chat, the next thing to do is set a baseline for success – which will help you judge your ROI.

For example, if you’re using live chat to improve conversion rates on your website, review the current conversion rates on the pages the live chat will be used.

If you’re hoping to improve your customer service, you could conduct a customer satisfaction survey, putting particular emphasis on the online experience.

After your live chat has been live for a few months, you can rerun the survey to see if your Net Promotor Scores have improved.

How to make the most of your live chat

– Provide answers quickly

The point of using live chat is to provide customers with information when they’re browsing your website, so if you’re going to invest in live chat, it’s important to consider the people who will be managing the chat.

You should try to always provide information as quickly as possible so customers aren’t sitting around waiting for information.

– Make it active

One common mistake businesses make with live chat is using it reactively, waiting for customers to click the chat with us function before getting involved in a chat.

Instead, it’s better to make the live chat proactive and engage with customers directly.

For example, our live chat automatically pops up and engages with web users after they’ve been on the page for a certain time.

Making the live chat active will help improve engagement and, ultimately, conversions.

– Target your best pages

Live chat can be used site-wide, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

Instead, you should focus more on the most popular pages of your website and the main service pages or blog pages.

Putting live chat on your most visited pages increases the chance of engaging more users.

Using live chat on your service pages can engage customers at the very time they’re interested in your product or service.

– Capture leads directly

This is especially important if you’re planning to use live chat for conversions.

As part of your chat, you should actively try to capture lead information when talking to a customer.

You can ask for this information up front before connecting a customer with an agent, or you can ask for their information during the chat.

– Make it a human interaction

One of the misconceptions of live chat is that it’s an automated, robotic interaction with predetermined answers given depending on the enquiry the customer makes.

That’s a chatbot.

But this is live chat, and live chat works with a real person directly answering questions through the tool.

So it’s better to take advantage of this and make the conversation human.

Use the chat as an opportunity to talk directly to a user and use some personality to connect with them. Ask questions, follow up and make them feel like they’re talking to a real person – because they are.

– Send users their transcript

This is a quick win but is something that is often overlooked.

Sending the transcript of a conversation is not only a great way to provide customers with the useful information they need, but it also increases your lead generation from live chat, because the customer will provide you with their email address to receive the transcript.

Are you ready to improve your website’s experience with live chat?

Using live chat has the potential to transform your customer service and turn your website into a lead-generation machine.

If you want to find out more about the benefits of using live chat, get in touch with our experts