5 Tips Every Online Business Must Know to Use Live Chat Effectively
With a large number of websites using Live Chat on their website to engage their visitors in a sales chat, it is important to understand the visitor behavior and getting the maximum out of the chat technology. Using live chat ineffectively and aggressively can actually drive away visitors, doing more harm than good.
In order to succeed with Live Chat, online businesses must stick to the following principles:
- Use Good Live Chat Software. Because if you are using software that hangs, is slow or doesn’t have a simple and clean interface for both the operator and the visitor, you are driving away the prospect. Choose vendors that are well established and have a proven track record. Ask for testimonials. Look for the features that you need the most, and try before you buy. Not all vendors are equal, and in most cases, you’ll get what you pay for. Livechatdir.com periodically reviews vendors and has one of the most comprehensive live support software directory.
- Use The Proactive Feature Effectively. While initiating chats can be a good way to engage a visitor in a chat, it may as well drive them away if used aggressively. Our research shows that initiating chats in most cases is useless if a visitor has actively been researching your website for less than 3 minutes. In most cases, initiating chats aggressively could prove too intrusive to the visitors if done within the first minute, and will receive a near to 0% CTR. A good and sensible business will view the trends over a few weeks for their specific industry and will know whether to initiate or not. Again, it also depends on the way he chat is initiated. While software such as N-Contact (www.netlert.com) allows “truly proactive chats” that are not stopped by popup blockers, most other vendors provide a floating image to engage the visitor.
- Place The Live Chat Button Prominently. Our research shows that placing the live chat button at the right place in the buying cycle has a big role in increasing the CTR and conversions. For example, placing live chat button on a “product detail page” might attract better conversions than having them on all pages of an ecommerce website. This also reduces customer support costs by eliminating unnecessary chats that do not convert.
- Create Personal Touch. The best way to increase conversions is to make sure the operators are trained to understand the specific problem of each visitor, rather than using standard “canned responses”. The operators must be trained to act like real salespeople, who can offer a solution to the problems of the customers. In fact, isn’t this the whole point of adding live help in the first place?
- Be Online 24/7. Internet businesses have prospects coming 24/7, and nothing can damage the credibility of your company more than having an “offline” chat button. Prospects clicking on the live chat are seeking immediate help. A good recommendation is to use software that integrates live chat with a knowledgebase, where a visitor can find an answer even if the operators are not online. Vendors such as LivePerson (www.liveperson.com) do this very effectively.
About The Company
Livechatdir.com (http://www.livechatdir.com), an independent resource of live support software and live support research interviews live chat users, live chat vendors and operators on a regular basis at random to provide valuable information to businesses and helping them convert more.
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Live Support Chat Software Directory
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