When navigating a business’s website looking for support or help answering a question about a product or service, you may have been given the option to “live chat” with the business instead of sending an email, completing a contact form, or calling a phone number. Over the past decade, big companies have been offering live chat as a contact option because 53% of customers prefer it! Live chat has become a better way for companies to communicate with customers, and for customers to communicate with companies.
We are now seeing more and more small businesses start to take advantage of live chat for their own websites. By adding a live chat feature to your website, you can help remedy a slew of common customer support roadblocks, increase your own productivity, and give your company a competitive advantage.
3 Advantages of Using Live Chat
#1. Greater Convenience
When it comes to providing high-quality customer support for existing customers OR improving your odds of getting a new customer, the ease of which a customer can contact you AND the timeliness of your response are the two key factors in delivering a positive experience.
Adding a live chat feature to your website can help meet both of those demands because chat channels reduce the stress for customers in need of an immediate or quick response as compared to phone or contact form/email support. The chat widget on your website can also help guide the customer on their expected response time by visually marking if and when a representative will be ready to help.
#2. Improved Efficiency
With the added convenience of a more accessible support option, you or your support team can expect an increase in efficiency as well.
Live chat typically allows you to handle more than one case at a time, improving individual productivity. Plus, with the built in delays between responses on live chat, this typically leaves enough space for you to talk with three or more different people simultaneously!
Even without taking multiple chats at a time, the structure of live chat allows for easier, time-saving transitions between customers. As one chat ends, another can begin without the user being frustrated or turned off by a short wait.
#3. More User Friendly
Along the spectrum of customer support, live chat can be considered a halfway point between phone and email/contact form support. Chat is a happy medium between these two channels and it tends to be a happy medium for your customers too!
For example, compared to phones, chat doesn’t require an immediate response while still maintaining a fluid and progressing conversation. Plus, during a chat conversation, the customer can clearly lay out the problem and still give you the opportunity to read it, comprehend it, and provide an answer effectively.
According to a study, 66% of customers expected an immediate response or resolution when using phone for support. Live chat has proven to lessen the pressure for you and allow you more time to critically think and provide a productive answer.
#4. More Leads and/or Purchases
Sometimes a customer is ready to purchase or take advantage of your service but has a quick question or two that they want answered first. With live chat, they are able to get that information quickly and conveniently, increasing the likelihood that they will convert.
Even if they end up leaving or not using your service, you will have collected data from them that can help you deliver a better product, service, or support in the future.
Consider this
Now that we know how helpful live chat can be, you may be thinking to yourself, “should I add this to my own website?”. Before you do, here are a few things to consider…
What pages should you put live chat on?
The homepage of your website probably gets the most traffic, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right place to add live chat. Consider key action pages like the contact page or services page instead of just the homepage or instead of putting it on every single page. Find the places where your customers would come up with a question and place your live chat there so it is the next progression in their customer flow.
Who will work your live chat?
Typically, the answer is YOU! However, you may not be able to work your live chat due to one of any number of circumstances. Remember, the magic window to respond to a lead is five minutes. If you can’t be there when you say you are, you may only add more frustration to your customers!
What will be the impact on your page speed?
Google wants our websites to be fast. Adding a live chat service can add bloat to your website, forcing your website to load more information (and loading more means taking longer) that may negatively impact your page speed scores and your standing with Google.
For instance, in late 2018 Facebook came out with a widget that you can add to your website that allows for a visitor of your website to start a chat on your website that communicates back to you through Facebook Messenger. That way, you get a message directly to your computer or phone through a service that you most likely are already using! However, Facebook’s scripts that are used to connect it to your website add nearly 40 more requests and as much as 960kb of data that has to be loaded. This third-party code from Facebook can slow your website down by seconds in some circumstances, which is BAD!
So why tell us all of this?!?
To start, this is good information for anyone to know. It’s information that we learned ourselves when we were looking at adding live chat to Birthing Your Brand, both for visitors to our website and for our own users. Our live chat has become our primary form of communication with our users and our customers seem to like it!
Plus, we frequently get asked this type of question OR for us to help add the Facebook Chat embed code to a website so that a user can add live chat to their Birthing Your Brand website. We are happy to do it, and do not stop you from embedding third-party services to your website, but we do want to keep your website as fast as possible and do try to keep every tool that you need within our Birthing Your Brand platform.
That’s why we are testing our newest feature! We have found the best way to add a live chat option for your visitors to your website without interfering with site speed AND integrating with the platforms that you are used to. These platforms include Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Slack, Skype, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Viber, and more!
Here’s what it looks like:
Setting it up is super easy! In fact you can easily edit all of the text, images, and colors on it without any coding! Plus, since it integrates with so many different platforms for the actual chat portion, you can give your visitors multiple options so that they can reach out to you with a platform that they are comfortable with.
When a visitor clicks the button to start the chat, on desktop or laptop computers it will open a new tab with their preferred chat platform ready to write their first message to you. When on a phone, their phone will open the corresponding app to make it extremely seamless for them.
By adding this widget to your website, but having the chat through their favorite platform, we can avoid the website slowdowns that would typically occur with live chat AND still take complete advantage of all of the plusses that live chat adds!
What’s Coming Next?
This one tool that we are testing and is coming soon does not just help with live chat, it does so so so much more! Subscribe to our blog or follow us on social media to keep track of the second and third feature that this one tool will add!!!!
