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Guide to implementing live chat on your website - Movers Development

Guide to implementing live chat on your website

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It has become common knowledge that businesses need to put a priority on customer experience to ensure growth. It is only natural given that happy customers will want to stay with you and help you develop. What’s more, 80% of customers have reported the willingness to spend more money if that will ensure a better customer experience. Therefore, it’s your job as a business owner to address this and adjust your customer service, making it convenient for them. This means that if your customer support can only be reached on workdays and during working hours, via telephone, that is not a suitable approach. However, if a customer can reach you outside of this timeframe, they will experience improved customer support. And the way to do this is by implementing live chat on your website.

Key elements of customer experience

To ensure a great customer experience, you must consider and address the following customer needs:

  • Fast response – for inquiries in general, but it is crucial if a customer has a problem or a complaint.
  • Knowledgeable staff – your customers want to communicate with a person who can provide help.
  • Fast and easy contact – your customers want to reach customer representatives at any given time.
A person holding a mobile phone
In the world of instant messaging, people want instant responses to their inquiries at any given time.

Implementing live chat to your website will address all of these points, improving your customer experience, and ultimately, help you grow and make more profit. And along with the numerous advantages of having a live chat, research has shown that customers prefer it to any other communication method.

Best practices in implementing live chat on your website

First of all, your live chat feature should be easily accessible to your website visitors. For example, let’s imagine a customer has a question for you after researching moving companies quotes online. They would either have to read through numerous pages or scroll down to find contact information to reach a customer representative. A live chat pop-up in the corner of the screen would solve this issue. Now, when this is out of the way, let’s go over the best ways to implement live chat on your website so it works for your team and doesn’t become too overwhelming and extortionately expensive.

Place live chat pop-up on high-intent pages

Websites that receive high volume traffic could potentially cause a deluge of messages with this feature. It could result in support and sales teams dealing with low-level queries or prospects who are just “window shopping.” Therefore, you should put this widget on pages with a high purchase intent that will increase the number of high-quality conversations. For instance, if your company sells moving company software, you would put the widget on the pricing page. On the other hand, an e-commerce website would probably be better off placing it on the checkout page.

Use real names and photos

Many companies opt for the company logo or an obviously fake photo. But think about it, who would you rather talk to, a faceless logo or Amy from Movers Development? Although we may instinctively think it smarter to hide behind a logo, customers are more willing to initiate communication with a real human being.

A person typing in front of two monitors
When implementing live chat on your website, the important thing to consider is that customers want to talk to real people, rather than faceless corporate logos.

Provide fast response times and use automation for implementing live chat on your website

The fact that customers receive their responses immediately has earned live chat the title of customers’ preferred communication method. So, implementing live chat on your website won’t make any difference if it takes your representatives ages to respond. Therefore, make sure you have enough staff to handle the given volume of messages.

Having said that, it is also important to understand that having a live chat doesn’t necessarily imply having to reply instantaneously. That would very quickly lead to staff burn-out. However, there are ways to keep your customer satisfied by providing them with an estimation of when they can expect their answer. You can use automation to set up instant responses that will give them such information. Alternatively, such instant responses can ask customers what they need assistance with and, based on their answers, connect them with an available agent.

Signal a customer that an agent is present

When a customer sends a question, it may take a minute for an agent to understand it or find a suitable solution. During that time, you don’t want your customer to feel ignored. So you need a way to signal them that someone is there to respond. The easiest way to do this is to include a typing indicator.

Moreover, if your agents cannot respond immediately, train them to buy time by acknowledging the customers’ questions by typing something along the lines of “I see what you mean,” and such.

Connect clients with knowledgeable agents

If you can’t give your customers efficient solutions to their problems, you do not provide good customer support even if your responses are fast. For this reason, it’s essential to connect customers with knowledgeable agents who can help them. To do so, you’ll probably have to collect additional information about the inquiry. For example, we all know the upsides of CRM software solutions, but admittedly, people might have difficulty using them. So, you need to find out what exactly the issue is to be able to connect them with an agent capable of providing adequate assistance. Moreover, if the client has additional questions that the current agent can’t address, there should be an option to transfer them to the next agent.

A hand typing on a keyboard
Customers want to be connected to knowledgeable agents who can help them with their problems.

How to implement live chat on your website

Implementing live chat on your website is a very straightforward task and doesn’t require much work. Whichever tool you decide to use, the steps are pretty much the same:

  1. Create your account on the homepage of your preferred tool.
  2. Start your live chat trial, which is usually free for the first few weeks. It will give you enough time to decide if it works for you.
  3. Install the messenger on your website. The most challenging part for a layman, but thankfully you can ask your website developers for a bit of help. It will hardly take more than five minutes.

Live chat has become a rule

Implementing live chat on your website has become a rule rather than a sporadic occurrence. The phone or email type of communication has become obsolete in the world of mobile phones and instant messaging. Live chat will allow you to provide the best possible experience to each and every customer.