Live Chat for Website Software Cheat Sheet
Live chat is a communication channel.
A button is placed on your website, which instantly connects the visitor to the company in a chat session. Text based messages are sent in real time between a visitor and human operator.
Who uses Live Chat?
Many organisations use live chat, from one man bands to multimillion enterprises across vast amounts of industries, including but not limited to:
- Automotive
- Charities
- Education
- Financial Services
- Government and Public Services
- Healthcare
- Utilities
- Real Estate
- Retail and Consumer
- Transport and Logistics
The Benefits of Live Chat for Website
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Visitors’ time is precious to them, live chat allows questions to be answered quickly rather than waiting for a response via email or being held on the phone.
Increase Sales
With customers satisfied with their answers and your company’s service they are more likely to continue with their purchase.
Upsell / Cross Sell Opportunities
Whilst in chat the operator can gauge which products and services the visitor is interested in and suggest alternatives or complimentary items.
Reduce Costs / Increase Productivity
Live chat enables your representatives to handle multiple enquiries at the same time. With their increase in productivity the team does not need to be as large as a team dealing with phone or email enquiries, therefore money can be saved on staff wages.
Increase First Contact Resolution Rate
Live chat can direct the visitor to the correct department from the prechat form, allowing them to get the help they need first time around, rather than calling or emailing a generic contact and being transferred around the organisation.
Features of Live Chat
Chat Button and Windows
These are the main aspects of the visitor experience of chat. The button can initiate a chat session or a pre-chat form, which gathers visitors’ details before entering the dialogue window. After a chat has finished a post-chat survey can a presented to collect instant feedback. If the chat is unavailable a call back form can be displayed instead to gather contact details.
Predefined Replies
Set up a library of agreed responses that are readily available to operators whilst in chat. These can be used wholly or partially to fit the question by adapting the reply before hitting send.
The predefined replies speed up operators’ response times and their accuracy to provide a correctly spelled and factual reply.
Auto Navigate
Automatically push a page in front of your visitor, opening the specific page in a separate browser. This is great for assisting visitors looking for certain information that is available on your website.
Co-Browse
See a replica of the page your visitors are viewing during chat to help advise and support them better, especially useful during product selection, form completion and checkout.
Transfer / Invite
If the visitor is asking questions you are unsure about the answer you can transfer the chat in its entirety to another operator, or to keep control of the chat and add a supervisor or colleague into the chat to help.
Website Analytics
Monitor visitor behaviour to analyse trends, enabling your organisation to make amendments to the website and measure the effect on the visitor journey.
Proactives
Display an image automatically in front of visitors to invite them into chat to reduce abandonment, or with redirection to pages of interest with further information.
Reports
Analyse the activity and results within live chat to see account information including operator availability behaviour, details of the chats including full transcripts and any other information collected by the solution.
Live Chat for Website Statistics
- 57% of online customers say they are very likely to abandon their purchase if they can't quickly find the answer to their question. Send proactive invitations to reduce abandonments.
- 44% of online customers say having questions answered by a live operator while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer.
- 63% of visitors are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat.
- If your operators are available during normal UK operational times, in a day that’s 8 hours potential contact time with site visitors! In a week it’s 40 hours and throughout a month it’s around 180!
- 85% of customers with unanswered questions will try another site for more information; ensure a live chat button is available on every page of your website.
- Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone.
- Millennials especially young adults between the age of 16 and 25 prefer to communicate via text-based means rather than traditional methods such as phone.
This article was written with aim to give you an overview glance at live chat for website software, and be able to take away the information in bite size chunks. If there is anything you are searching for and we have missed it, get in touch by emailing marketing@click4assistance.co.uk and let us know.
