Should I include Live Chat or not?

Live chat will give extra advantage to your site. This will give your users opportunity to get connect with you and solve most of their queries in very first time.

Yes.

Live chat is amazing for addressing any concerns your customers may have IMMEDIATELY.

Think about it... If your website isn't good enough at selling someone 100%, they could just leave and go somewhere else. But you have the ability to sell someone directly 1 on 1 if they land on your website and choose to talk to you. That's very powerful.

Always go with a live chat option. Especially if it's a high ticket product.

Having an additional service is always a plus. The real question is, is it worth it?

If you can have someone that can cover it amongst his other work for minimum expenses than it is probably worth it. It also depends on how often would your clients decide to use that service.

Worst case scenario is you are paying someone to do this and you have like 1 question a day.

SEO for RealEstate seems like a niche where clients could have some questions for you.

I hope some people who are using Live Chat will get back to you with their experiences.

We are using skype to cover this. Skype account where every employee logs in so when the question comes in anyone can answer it.

And in SEO niche people tend to have some question before they decide to purchase a service from you.

You have to include Live Chat in your website otherwise bounce rate will be more. Most of the people don't waste their time in finding Contact Us form or Contact Us Link. However, if you include Live Chat and start conversion as soon as they visit your website, you can understand what type of service they need.

Some customers post their queries in Live Chat itself. So, it is necessary to include.

I think it will be very useful for your users to have a live chat where they can ask their questions and solve their problems instantly! If I were you I would definitely add the live chat!

Going by the posts above, I should definitely consider implementing Live Chat, however, am wondering if I should wait so that I have enough numbers to make it viable - Considering it will need someone to attend to the queries almost all the time. Anybody currently having live chat on their site? What is your experience?

Absolutely! But it also depends on what type of site you have.. But for 90% online business i would recommend it.

Hi there.
Yes, Its necessary to have Live Chat in your website to help you close more deals/sales because you are offering a Seo Service so many people come to your website and they have many questions that needs to be answered as soon as possible. So my recommendation is to have a Live Chat Plugin in your site. It will help you a lot.
Hope it helps
Andres

K Edward,

For your ideal prospects? Yes, I think so. Here's why:

They're most likely used to talking to someone when they want to acquire services and supplies.

They want instant answers to specific questions that they have about your services.

They probably won't be able to quickly and conveniently find what they're looking for from your onsite content. Most likely, a lot of them just have general knowledge in SEO and its potential impact on their campaigns. They're actively looking for good SEO providers with relevant experience in the real estate markets probably because what they know is that they need to get top Google rankings for relevant searches by their ideal prospects in their target areas, and that's it.

I don't expect them to spend a lot of time doing that when they could just simply go to the next provider that offers phone support and live chat.

If you're worried of added manpower costs, then you can look for phone and live chat support companies that might be interested in revenue share arrangements (pay per performance agreements). That way, you can just focus on driving traffic to your site, and for them to just focus on closing sales for you and providing support to your customers ...

We include live chat on our site and it increased sales 27%, the key is of course having someone there to provide quality response when people do engage the chat.

I think you should include a live chat. Some visitors may have one or more questions about real estate. Furthermore, adding a live chat will gradually increase visitors to your website because some will refer new visitors to your website.

Unless you're going to have someone there to answer questions 24/7, I'd give it a pass. Personally I find it annoying when the "live chat" window pops up with a message saying it's unavailable. I always think: What's the point of having it if it's "dead chat"?
Just my 2 cents!

I support to use the Live chat option. because one customer can get instant answer from you. So anyone will like this service without any hesitation. It will give you an extra benefit to your business. Thanks for your interest.

In the time you took to post here, you could have had Live Chat up and running... :-)

If you are selling "high ticket" services, it is a must...

Simply put, it helps your prospects feel more comfortable handing over their hard earned cash... while you address any lingering questions or concerns.

Yes, because you cab answer their questions live and fast. People don't like to wait. If its a WordPress website it's an easy setup, plus there are a lot of good free WordPress plugin for live chat.

Have a good one :-)

Will you have someone to chat 24 hours a day?

By someone, I mean someone good, who can answer any and all questions on the spot?

By someone, I mean enough people to answer all chat requests promptly. What happens if you have 10 at the same time? 30 at the same time?

Did you ask your current visitors if they'd use it?

I usually get pissed of if there ISN'T a live chat... Cuz then it means I have to wait for an answer, or call on the phone, and I'll literally choose service providers depending on live chat or not. lol

However, it pisses me off even MORE if live chat doesn't answer within a few minutes...

So I'd say definitely have live chat, available 24/7 on a moments notice.

I would implement it if you are only dealing with a small amount of potential customers on a daily basis. Once you start getting into high amounts of traffic it would be better IMO to keep things fully automated hands off.

My fifty cents worth here...

I offer Live Chat on the majority of my websites where I may need to answer questions related to the content or services. I don't arbitrarily place it everywhere, just where it's the most important to ME.

As I have many products and services that I offer my clients, I find that it ends up saving me a great deal of time with support tickets and fodder back and forth by email if I can answer the question quickly.

I also have a chat app on my phone that connects to my chat server for my websites. Since my phone is ever-present, I can usually respond quickly. If I am unavailable, they end up leaving a message.

Another point to make, however, is that you should think through how you will be using the chat facility. If it will be a high-traffic location, you may want to outsource someone to monitor it for you, should you choose to implement it.

Hope this helps.

I would definitely go with live chat.

It gives your site that added "trust" factor in my opinion.

Plus, hey, if I have a question--and I want it answered--and I am sick of waiting for an email reply--I will use live chat.

live chat will give to your website extra credibility and it will be easy for visitors to satisfy their presale questions

In that way you will do immediate conversations with your potential leads and in that way you will convert more of leads to customers and that will be better to you thus your biz

Yes, go for it. But only if you're able to have someone there to answer questions

Most definitely me personally If that was a field I wanted to invest in I would greatly want to connect with whomever is providing me with that services. Honestly I believe in any situation being able to sit face to face with whoever I plan on doing business with is a far greater reward because I can see and feel how genuine the energy is from the person and getting a feel that they are about my best interest in doing business and not just trying to squeeze a dollar out my pocket!

I've just installed a live chat on one of my clients websites and manned it for a few days while I was finishing the site up.

I used the free Tawk.to widget on the website and it connects to a free phone app.

So as long as the site owner is awake then they can answer customer questions. It's a local store website so only needed 9 to 5 but you could always hire a virtual assistant to handle the off hours and add them to your team via the control panel.

Live chat is a must, if you don't want to miss out a potential customer. You can do your own part, such as be the customer support within your local time from 9am to 5pm.

After that, you can hire some freelancer to cover the rest (of course, you will only need to do it, if your business is rapidly growing)...

Originally Posted by K Edward There is this new site we have been putting together which offers SEO services for the Real Estate industry for now. I thought I had it all figured out until my developer asked whether we should include live chat or not. I thought I could use some advice from here. Should we include Live Chat or Not? And why? Thanks in advance.

That is entirely up to you and what your clients require.

If they feel live chat is better as they can hear your speaking, by all means go ahead and implement it.

I don't click on live chat. I don't like talking on the phone or typing with strangers (which is weird because I do that here.) I always feel like they are tryng to sell me something, so I would rather put in a request and hope the turn around is quick

Live chat will give extra advantage to your site. This will give your users opportunity to get connect with you directly

Yes, yes, yes! Consumers prefer to live chat over picking up the phone and holding...

It is something you need to test.

There are solutions where you can outsource the chat functions and they can function on a pay per lead basis.

These services usually work on getting the prospect to enter their email or phone number so a customer service representative can answer their questions.

We have used this type of service and we found it expensive because we were getting existing clients using the service to check on progress of existing work and then we got some distant traffic that wasn't going to convert on a local level.

We've also used our own in-house staff to answer various chat requests but this is also problematic because of the nature of the responses.

It is a bit like a call room. You need to have successful scripts and trained and intelligent people to reply and stick to the process to generate a positive ROI.

The latest chat type service we are trialling is a Robot.

Robotic chat where it builds a bank of questions and answers as you go and you can pre-load Q&A is generating some interesting response.

Although this is generating chat logs it is too early to say whether there is a positive benefit.

We run geolocation of the IPs through the chat and the analytics are showing there people using the chat are not necessarily our ideal clients.

The robotic chat will get better over time but the early indications are more towards a negative experience than a positive one.

This might be more in relation to the chat box obscuring data on mobile or popping up at inappropriate times etc.

We've now moved towards making it very unobtrusive and have prevented it popping up at set times or on exit. This starting to have better results.

Nothing really beats getting someone on the phone, or getting them on a live conversation with a real rep.

If you can't get them on a call or get a team to really manage the chat then you are better off moving them towards providing contact information so you can contact them professionally.

You might like to look at the mobile call back software options or just use a standard lead form with a mobile number field enabled and follow them up with a live call back.

We've personally seen that working best across a number of clients with whom we've tried a multitude of chat and contact options.

The reason this works better for my clients is they get their best phone sales people on the phone calling the prospect back rather than the prospect having a less than optimal experience which taints the sale from the get go.

Best regards,

Ozi

its very powerful.
I had website maybe 3 years ago where we couldnt sell product in about 100 visitors, after implementing chat we converted 1 sales per 20 visitors!!!

Since I set up an instant text system on 4 of my websites, I've seen a 400% increase in conversions. Some customers even text me instantly after they make a purchase. I'm usually on my computer about 4 hours a day whereas my phone is with with me all the time.

This is by far the best option for me. Text messaging from a browser is faster and more efficient than a chat system that is unmanned. If you do use chat, set it up with an auto answer if you are not able to be there live. Ask them to text you and give them your number. Your credibility will instantly jump through the roof.