DIY Website Live Chat - Mistakes to Avoid

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Giving website visitors the ability to ask questions while they're browsing your website can boost conversions. Using website live chat to do this has been mentioned a few times on this forum, including in the thread at http://www.warriorforum.com/ecommerc...t-feature.html.

We've been managing live chat for quite a few stores, including Big Commerce stores, and have seen how to make it work really well. We've also learned what doesn't work.

I published a post sharing mistakes to avoid if you're going to manage the website chat system yourself, but here's the basics:
  • Don't ignore visitors that come to the website after business hours - There's a good percentage of website visitors that come after hours or on weekends and if you are not available to answer their questions, you end up missing opportunities. Some sites get a nice spike of traffic after business hours, so having live chat online during this time is a great opportunity.
  • If someone is frustrated or unable to complete their purchase, help them (duh!) - You can configure special greetings to show if someone puts something in their shopping cart, but then hits the back button or if they spend a certain amount of time on specific product pages. By popping up with a low pressure offer to help at the perfect time, you are able to help visitors that are having trouble making a purchase. Simply having a "Ask a Question" or "Click to Chat" option on the site is not enough.
  • Don't have chat online, but be super slow in response... - We do 1500+ chats per per week and find that most website visitors that ask a question on chat will not browse through other pages while chatting - they'll sit and wait for an answer. It's important to respond to their first chat in seconds, and then keep them updated re your progress every 30 seconds max.

I also went into the economics of managing the website chat yourself, vs hiring someone to manage it for you. Hint - it's way more cost effective, and effective over all, to have someone else manage it for you - but I might be biased ; )

You can see the full post at https://helpflow.net/blog/live-chat-costs/ along with data and screenshots, but let's keep the discussion here on the forum so we can go deep.
#chat #conversion optimization #customer service #live chat

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