12 days of Click-mas: 2 ways to experience live chat

Click4Assistance offers two ways of experiencing live chat: reactive and proactive. Discover what these are and why organisations use them.

There are two ways you can go about Live Chat on your website: reactive and proactive. Which you choose depends on the type of service you offer and your site visitor interaction goals. Sometimes you need to communicate aggressively, while other times, it pays to be passive.

The purpose of this page is to explain the two ways you can implement a live chat experience on your website over Christmas with Click4Assistance’s solutions. We make it easy to add a chatbot to your website that can triage customers, escalating them to your agents when necessary.

Reactive

Reactive live chat involves responding to users when they actively communicate with you. In this situation, they are the proactive party, and you remain passive until they choose to speak to you.

Practically speaking, reactive Live Chat typically takes the form of a chat button in the bottom right-hand corner of the browser window. Users click this icon to bring up a chat window to interact with a chatbot, an agent, or both.

Organisations implement reactive live chat facilities for numerous reasons, including limited resources, a low customer volume capacity, or concerns about intrusiveness. (It may not be appropriate to be proactive with customers via live chat in some industries).

Some companies like to prioritise customer-initiated forms of contact. These indicate website visitors’ interest in the brand, indicating they are leads. Other organisations prefer reactive approaches because it enables them to retain a natural website experience. Users can browse pages at their leisure and contact firms when they require assistance, perhaps with completing the checkout process.

Finally, reactive chat can be superior for handling complex or sensitive enquiries. Launching into a conversation about financial or health issues may feel inappropriate to website visitors, prompting them to click back to search results.

Proactive

Proactive chat involves engaging users in conversation actively when they arrive on your site based on the rules you define. This approach guarantees interaction with website visitors.

The rules you choose depend on your marketing strategy, business model, and analysis of lead behaviour. The correct rules improve the likelihood of customers doing what you want them to do, such as buying products or signing up for newsletters.

Rules you could implement for initiating chats include:

• Visitor behaviour, such as spending a long time on a specific page
• Page views, such as when visitors return to the same page twice or more
• Referral sources, such as a visitor coming from an organic search or an ad placement
• Visitor characteristics, such as their location for local businesses
• Previous interactions, such as when a customer has a history of actively chatting to you on prior occasions without your prompting
• Specific triggers, such as cart abandonment
• Form submissions, such as when users submit a form and are awaiting feedback or a response
• Keyword usage, such as when visitors type certain keywords into your website’s internal search function.

Organisations implement proactive live chat on their websites for numerous reasons. The main justifications are reducing cart abandonment and boosting sales. Initiating conversations with leads who don’t complete the check-out process can improve conversions. Personalised assistance builds trust, encourages customers to finish their purchases, and enables data collection to enhance products or improve marketing approaches.

Other reasons organisations implement proactive live chat include:

• Providing customers with personalised support and recommendations, including helping them find the products or services they need, delivering additional contextual information, and explaining why some purchases might be better than others
• Seeking cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, suggesting why a higher-margin product might be better
• Building deeper relationships with customers and developing rapport
• Handling a higher volume of customer service traffic when phone lines are busy
• Using conversation to improve brand perception and give website visitors more confidence

Choose Click4Assistance’s Live Chat Solution

Click4Assistance’s Live Chat solution supports reactive and proactive approaches to customer interactions. You can engage website visitors with human agents or chatbots built using our no-code, highly intuitive Bot Builder.

Additional features of Click4Assistance’s Live Chat include:

• The ability to insert forms into chat windows to gather customer information (smartContact)
• Reactive and proactive Video Chat experiences
• Reactive and proactive Click2Call experiences (where customers can click a button to request an automatic phone call back)
• Proactive promotion displaying various advertising materials.

Experience Click4Assistance’s Live Chat solutions today and see the difference for yourself.