4 Tips for Implementing a Live Chat on Your Website – Nowadays, online consumers are more concerned about the overall customer experience they’ll encounter on a website than the quality of products in stock. The main reason is that consumers have quite high expectations when it comes to browsing websites and online stores.
They want the entire process to be as seamless as possible. Moreover, they also expect a high level of service and support should they run into some issues or happen to have any questions.
That’s why it’s crucial that you remove any friction your users may encounter, as well as ensure that your customer service and support representatives are very responsive. This is where the live chat feature comes into play.
With live chat, consumers no longer have to be put on hold like with phone calls or wait endlessly for someone to respond to their email. That’s why live chat became their preferred method of communication.
Keeping that in mind, here are a few tips for implementing a live chat feature on your website.
1. Make sure you have enough staff
When there’s a live chat feature on a website, online consumers expect fast responses and instant solutions. In order to meet such expectations, you must ensure that you have enough staff that will respond to consumer queries.
This can be predominantly challenging if you have a large consumer base. The more potential customers you have, the more they’ll ask around.
Keep in mind that your staff members don’t have to respond instantaneously, but the longer you keep users waiting, the more aggravated they’ll become.
Having enough staff to respond to live chat questions and issues will ensure customer satisfaction and improve the overall customer experience.
However, your staff needs to be rotated regularly so that they don’t experience burnout. They are humans and they need regular breaks to keep functioning properly.
2. Make your live chat feature visible
People want and expect convenience, which is pretty much a standard these days. Consequently, it’s very important that you make your live chat feature as visible and easily accessible as possible.
The best practice is that have a pop-up chat window implemented at the bottom right corner of the screen.
It would be prodigious if this feature was available on every page, but if you can’t afford that, you should at least focus on high-intent pages.
Furthermore, make sure that the design of the live chat feature matches your website design. You can hire a reliable New York web design agency to help you out, for instance, provided you lack the necessary know-how.
Once everything is properly implemented and designed, your users can simply click on the pop-up and activate the live chat feature whenever they feel like it.
If you don’t make the feature more accessible, your customer will have to look for the feature themselves, which means they are likely to give up at some point and just bounce off.
3. Train your staff well
It won’t matter much that you’re providing your users with fast responses if you fail to provide them with efficient solutions to their issues.
The entire purpose of having a live chat feature is that you can resolve peoples’ problems fast and efficiently. That requires staff members who are knowledgeable and skilled in dealing with the most common problems your customers may face.
That’s why it’s significant to train your staff well so that they can provide customers with viable solutions. This will ensure a high quality of customer service and support aside from ensuring fast responsiveness.
Therefore, take the time to educate your staff on dealing with such problems and provide them with the accurate tools to help them do their job more efficiently.
If there happens to be an issue, your live chat staff can’t handle, make sure they can transfer users to a more skilled agent in the matter.
4. Don’t shy away from using chatbots
As mentioned before, your staff members don’t have to respond immediately to live chat but also keeping users waiting for too long can be counterproductive. This is where chatbots can be of great service.
Even though a lot of people want to communicate with a real person so that they can have their questions answered or their issues resolved, chatbots can still fill that role. They can keep customers engaged until a human agent is ready to address the customer.
After all, chatbots are designed to mimic human behaviour using artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning and natural language recognition capabilities.
Therefore, don’t underestimate just how useful chatbots can be in providing at least basic customer service and support.
Live chat is a feature that can remain easily designed and implemented on your website. However, it’s the people who operate this feature that matter the most.
If you don’t have enough staff or your staff isn’t knowledgeable enough to actually help your customers, it won’t matter much that your website has a live chat feature.