Live Chat Features that Increase Your Strategy’s Effectiveness

If you know anything about live chat, you know that it enhances your customers’ experience. There are specific features that you need to look for that make live chat attractive to your customers. There are also features like those described below that will help make your live strategy as effective as possible.

Tracking Chat Initiations

Tracking where a customer initiated a chat will give you very useful information. For example, you may find that you need to update the content on a page that people find confusing. Or, you may see where there is a lot of interest about a particular product or service.

Initiating Chat with Anonymous or Authenticated Visitors

Live chat is an excellent way to start building relationships with website visitors you don’t know. You need to be able to initiate a chat on sections of the website where visitors aren’t logged in to an account. You can gather contact information and get to know the visitor. On the other hand, you need to be able to assist your existing customers after they’ve logged in. Look for the ability to do both.

Uploading Files During a Chat

This feature will make your live chat more useful for your customers. But, it can also reduce the time your support reps spend resolving an issue. If customers can’t upload files, you face the problem of giving the customer more work to do to upload a file somewhere else. Besides that, a different support rep will probably have the responsibility of resolving the issue, starting from scratch.

Scheduling Callbacks

For more complex issues, you may need to contact the visitor via telephone. Having the ability to schedule a callback during the live chat will save time for your support reps and your customers.

Rating the Chat Session

Giving customers the opportunity to rate their live chat experience illustrates that you care about them. More importantly, you need to get ratings to help you continuously improve your live chat system. It can also provide insight into the performance of specific employees.

Launching Surveys

Sometimes a simple rating doesn’t provide actionable feedback. Therefore, you need the ability to launch a survey after a live chat session is completed. The survey will provide much more information useful to fine-tuning your live chat approach.

Tracking and Storing Chat Logs Securely

You’ll want to track and store your live chat system’s logs for future reference and analysis. It’s important that you establish a secure way to store the logs to protect the privacy of your business and your customers.

Banning Visitors from Chat

Not all of your website visitors are going to use live chat correctly. In today’s environment, there are spammers who take pleasure in driving you crazy. You may also come across visitors who are confused about what you do and will take your rep’s time for no good purpose. Naturally, you’d want to use the ban feature wisely, but it can be very helpful.

Branding Your Chat Page

From a marketing and branding standpoint, you want the web visitor to feel like they’re talking directly to your business. A chat widget that promotes the name of the company providing the chat software isn’t helping establish your brand as a business that cares about its customers. Make sure you can brand the chat window to look consistent with your other marketing vehicles.

Final Thoughts

Live chat is a proven tool you can use to give your prospects and customers an excellent experience when communicating with your business. In fact, 49 percent of companies say they increase conversions when live chat is available.

If you want to explore how live chat can benefit your business, feel free to call us at 866-239-9699, or send an email. Our experts can help you make the most of a live chat system.