Last Updated on September 1, 2023 by David
Guest Post by David Henzel. David is a serial entrepreneur on a mission to rid the world of bad customer experiences. He’s also the founder of @LTVplusHQ @TaskDrive and @MaxCDN.
Live chat is awesome. It is intuitive, it helps users instantly and it builds an instant connection with your users. The question of whether live chat works has already been answered many times — It works.
Live chat can also be so much more. With proper optimization and training, live chat can go beyond customer support and can be one of the major tools in increasing conversions for your website.
This article will tell you exactly how.
Origins of Live Chat and New Roles
Live chat started off as a customer service tool in large e-commerce stores. When users had an issue with their problems, they could connect with the support team in traditional ways (email/call) or via live chat. The advantage there was the sweet response time when compared with other mediums.
With live chat, businesses could reach customers within minutes, compared to sluggish time periods for other mediums (like an average 12 hours for email).
It soon took off as the most popular form of customer support. Today, 41% of customers prefer live chat as their support channel, beating all other communication channels — even social media.
If you think of the customer experience for users on websites, live chat fits perfectly.
Large-scale e-commerce stores are like huge departmental stores. Customers browse around, pick what they like, and checkout their carts themselves. It is a pretty simple process. However, due to the large variety of products, users sometimes need help to guide them in the right direction.
Imagine yourself after a long day in a store like this, looking for sheets. You reach out to an associate, and they guide you to the appropriate section. They also tell you where you can find related products like pillow covers etc. (upselling). This interaction is helpful, both to the customer and the business.
Live chat made it possible for online stores and now you don’t have to make your users wait for 12 hours just to get a response.
Live chat won because it made the experience more human — much closer to the real thing.
Other types of businesses soon understood that live chat could become a bigger part of humanizing their online customer experience, bringing it closer to the real brick-and-mortar store experience.
The customer experience of specialized e-commerce stores has to be that of a small store in real life. No matter the size of your catalogue, the experience you’re offering is of a niche store — a more personalized and comfortable one.
Let us suppose you own a small store selling specialized sneakers. When a user comes in, you will try to help them from the get-go. You’ll assess their requirements, present them with the choices they have, and even help them take a decision. This is the experience your users expect when they “walk” into your e-commerce website.
If you’re selling a single product, such as a SaaS — it gets even more personal. The customer experience you’re going for with your specialized product website/SaaS website is like a kiosk in an internet shopping mall.
Imagine stopping by one of the kiosks in real life. Though they have very informative pamphlets for you to look through, you are more likely to want to talk to the person sitting inside if you’re interested.
The same goes for your website. You may have an awesome website, but a website not using live chat is like an empty kiosk. Even though your website gives all the technical details like the pamphlets, having no one to talk to will leave the user dissatisfied.
In these cases, your live chat becomes the face and voice of your business. And just like real life, the user’s interaction with a ‘human’ representative plays a huge role in helping, and ‘converting’ when they are indecisive.
Like store employees being trained in real life to help the customers in the best way possible, you have to optimize the chat experience.
It can be broken down into two parts: the chat interface and the chat agents.
Increasing Conversions: Optimizing Live Chat
The chat platform is the face of your business. An optimized live chat experience will help you get more conversions by being in the right place at the right time, and helping users out. There are a few aspects to consider here:
Analytics
Use a chat platform that offers analytics for user behavior on your website. Analyze the pages the users are spending time on and how they’re interacting with them. Identify pages facing the most drop-offs and being seemingly difficult for users etc. This will give you an insight into the pain points your users are facing. The next step would be working on removing this friction.
Proactive Chat
It is a good idea to invite users to chat instead of waiting for them to approach you. This works especially on the pages or points of your website where users might be dropping off or abandoning the page. Being proactive shows users that you care about their experience, and it gives them the assurance that help is there if they need it.
Re:amaze proactive message triggersPersonalization
Personalize your responses and/or invitations to chat with the user. This can be based on the pages they visit and their behavior on these pages. For example, if a user has been on the pricing page of your website for more than 2 minutes, something like “Hey, confused about the pricing? Feel free to ask us any questions” would sound warmer than a generic opener like “How can I help you?”
This personalization adds a human touch to the exchange so the user feels more connected.
You could also show the agent’s name and picture (preferably), so that the user understands that they are chatting with a human and not a chatbot. This will make them more likely to have a conversation, instead of chatting with someone called “Live Chat Agent.”
Right place, right time
Being proactive with your live chat platform is a major weapon for increasing conversions. The key point to remember is to do it just right. Overdo it, and it will seem obtrusive and turn away customers.
It’s also good to learn about defensive and offensive chat rules while personalizing live chat, so you can target users at the exact time and place which helps your case.
There are many chat platforms that you can choose from. Multichannel platforms like Re:amaze provide all these features and more. It’s best to check the features provided by any platform for a fit before you settle on one.
Increasing Conversions: Training Live Chat Agents
If live chat support is the face of your user experience, the chat agents are its voice. They will be the ones behind your live chat windows driving the conversions, and it is essential to train them for success.
Major areas for agents to be experts in:
Understanding the Chat Software
Your software is like a sword, and your agents are like Ninjas. They must understand the tools inside out and all its functionalities to kill at conversion rates. They should be familiarized with the most important buttons, canned responses, features etc.
Other than these, you should also train your chat agents to understand analytics, reporting and drawing conclusions from user behavior to help users better.
Understanding the product
Needless to say, chat agents should be champions of the product and all the aspects it offers. They should be trained to understand all the technicalities of the product and any doubts the user may have about them. If a user has any doubts, your agent should be a confident expert who can guide them correctly.
Practicing Empathy
The most important thing that you need to teach chat agents is empathy. Understanding the customer’s doubts and frustrations and genuinely trying to help them should be the core philosophy of their training.
It is also important to train agents to use a appropriate tone and language that works for live chat (unlike the other forms of communication like email). Other than reassuring the customer, an appropriate tone also helps the user to ease up as they know they’re chatting with a human being.
Understand that there will always be some difficult or angry users. Live chat agents must remember to handle them with extra care and being as helpful as possible without sounding rude.
Being Available 24/7
Having your store online is akin to your store never being closed. I feel that many companies treat this as a coincidence rather than taking full advantage of it.
If you are open all the time, your ideal clients could walk in any time from any part of the world. And when they do walk in, your chat team should be armed and ready to convert them. In fact, 51% of consumers say a business needs to be available 24/7.
For teams who are not available 24/7, a chat platform like Re:amaze, which offers asynchronous chat options when you’re not available (users can leave a message), makes sense.
But remember, the immediacy of live chat can be lost here. If your team is not available 24/7, a better option would be to hire professional live chat agents to manage your communications. At LTVplus, we provide Dedicated Live Chat agents for E-commerce to help you skyrocket your conversions using proper techniques and resources.
Developing Protocols
Based on your product and/or website, you need to develop a set of protocols for your agents on how to react in certain situations. This list of use cases will also grow over time as you interact with more users. Create a set of protocols for every situation, and stick to it. Modify it over time based on feedback from users, making it smoother over time. This set of protocols will ensure that your customer experience will remain consistent over time for users.
Once you have optimized your live chat software for your product, developed protocols for interacting with customers, and trained your agents for the job, you will begin to notice more prospects coming through, when in the past they would’ve been lost.
At LTVPlus, we provide dedicated live chat agents for our clients and help them optimize the entire process.
With our help in implementing the live chat best practices — OptinMonster increased their conversion rate by 11X within 3 months.
The roadmap to more conversions with live chat is always an iterative process towards optimized results. Your aim should always be to provide as human an experience for your users as possible, improving it over time to reduce the friction.
What strategies do you use at your organization for increasing conversions with live chat? Feel free to discuss them in the comments section.
Interested in what else we have to say? Make sure to recommend this article by clapping and follow us for more stories about startup life, customer service, and tips on treating customers right.
You can also find our multi-brand, multi-channel customer service platform at https://www.reamaze.com. Follow @reamaze.