Should you add live chat to your website ?

1. Location is everything

It’s not simply an icon or widget for your footer, it’s there to stop site visitors hitting a dead end. If you’re serious about conversational marketing, taking steps to place your chat service in strategic places on your site will raise your chance of initiating contact, converting sales and make customers feel truly catered for.  

Your homepage probably gets the most traffic, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right place to add live chat. Consider key action pages like a pricing page, resources page, services pages, a contact page, or a free trial landing page.

These are the right places to try messaging because this is where visitors will have questions and express some level of interest simply by navigating there.

2. Automated Versus Human

Automated / AI chatbots are valuable to B2B brands when used as part of a blended workflow. At their most basic, they can greet and engage customers instantly by asking basic questions to pre-qualify interest before an agent gets involved 1-1.  

As marketers, we make a LOT of assumptions about how people navigate and interact with our websites. If you jump right in with an automated chatbot, you never give your visitors a chance to actually ask questions or tell you what they’re looking for / like least.” 

The set-it-and-forget-it mindset of an automated chatbot may seem like the perfect fix when your team says “I don’t have time for that!” But squashing the crucial function of ‘live-chat / live-conversation’, eliminates your opportunity to establish the magic of a genuine human connection. 

The first step of any conversational marketing endeavour is to start by listening — and a live-chat tool is the best way to kick-start that active listening phase. 

4. Put-in SLAs

The magic window to respond to a chat is 27 seconds.  If your chat widget pops on screen, you need to be ready to answer, because chat means ‘chat’ – it’s not a message taker.

Be thoughtful about how (and where) you roll out chat functionality so that it’s a strategic advantage to specific teams that have time to respond.  Plan ahead for chat coverage during; out of hours, peak times, high traffic campaigns & holidays.  

Consider outsourcing chat response to specialist agencies with knowledge of your industry and experience of setting the right voice & tone from day 1 (N.B. always keep it “conversational”).  

A specialist chat agency already knows which mistakes to avoid and will fast-track your service to a point where ROI goals are achieved quicker and your costs in the long run are less.

3. Integrate CRM

Remember to integrate your CRM with your chat tools and strategy. Not least to keep track of chat history so that past conversations can be referenced and provide better, more informed response services in the future. Your chat agents should be encouraged to take notes on customers as they chat, logging contextual information on; preferences, reservations and competitor/technical knowledge. 

Another key driver for combining CRM strategy is to personalise your chat service on a granular ‘wow factor’ level.

With most good chat technology you can create filtering rules that present chat options to visitors based on various types of; visitor information, behaviour & campaign history as well as browser language, device type & country.  

By visitor information we mean elements like: CTAs clicked, days since last visit, forms viewed , session counts, page/s visited, a referral URL,  an SEO topic (i.e. if the visitor viewed a page or blog post linked to a specific topic in your SEO tool) and SEO topic history.

5. Remember why you're doing it

Getting visitors to chat with you might not be the only measurement of success. 

Consider the objectives outlined above. What do you really need to conquer with chat? And what are the early indicators of success so you can determine if and when it’s worth scaling?