Did you know that 73% of customers find live chat to be the best way of communicating with a company? If that wasn’t surprising enough, 60% of chatters spend more per purchase than those who don’t chat.
Live chat is one of the greatest options you can use to improve customer experience, increase conversions, and streamline your operations. You can also use this tool to get more customer insights, allowing you to create better plans for achieving goals in the future.
Engaging your visitors on live chat is crucial if you want to drive conversions on your website. Thankfully, there are many ways to do so. Whether you want to improve your canned responses or work on your personalized messages, we’ll cover everything here.
On this page, you’ll learn how to engage your website visitors on live chat, giving you the results you need for success.
Setting the Stage for Successful Live Chat Engagement
There are many benefits of implementing live chat on your website, but that won’t matter if you don’t do it correctly. Before you start choosing a tool, you must define your goals.
What do you want to achieve with your live chat service? Is it better handling of customers? What about higher conversions?
Take your time to define your goals, as this will help you come up with the perfect solution.
Once you’re done, you must identify your target audience. This is the profile of who you’re selling to. What does your target audience need? Is there a problem that needs to be solved? If there is one, what solution do you have in mind for them?
Having the answer to all of these questions will take your strategy one step further.
The final step in this section is to focus on proactive chat initiation. Here, you’ll start the chat with the visitor instead of waiting for them to text. Not every person will talk to you when they visit a website, which is why you should take the lead and do it.
Proactive live chat will increase customer satisfaction, as you’re anticipating their needs. Other benefits include higher customer loyalty, reduced website bounce rate, and increased average order value.
Taking the step to talk to your visitors instead of waiting is crucial when talking about engagement, as it will show that you care.
Crafting Engaging Chat Conversations
Now, let’s talk about the conversations. How do you make them engaging enough?
It may not seem like it, but it’s very easy to make a conversation boring. You must use friendly and welcoming tones when talking to people. Otherwise, you risk making the interaction awkward.
Remember, they’re not talking to a robot. Your customers should feel like they’re talking to a human being that values their opinion and feelings. Make sure to focus on active listening and empathy. Show that you care about the client’s needs by offering the right solutions to their problems.
When people don’t care about something, it shows. Thankfully, it’s not too complicated to craft engaging conversations with your clients. Consider the following tips for success:
- Find points of connection with your client.
- Keep the conversation focused on the client.
- Respond quickly.
- Address specific visitor needs.
- Use canned responses, but try not to rely on them.
- Ask relevant questions.
- Ask for feedback.
Everything should feel like a smooth and friendly conversation. If you can achieve this, you’ll see an improvement in your engagement rates.
Utilizing Live Chat Features for Enhanced Engagement
The live chat tool that you use will come with unique features. Use them to your advantage.
One of the best tools you can use is the chatbot. They allow you to automate routine inquiries and provide quick support to anyone who needs it. Not only will you save time, but you’ll also make the support process much faster for your client.
It’ll take you some time to set up the chatbot, but take this as an opportunity to customize it to your needs. By the time you’re done, you’ll have the perfect companion to help you during your customer support journey.
There are more features to consider, though. Not everything is text. If you truly want to make your customer support experience succeed, you should consider incorporating rich media, including images and videos.
As you may already know, visuals help convey a message much better compared to other options. When words aren’t enough to explain something, an image or video is here to save the day. Many customers value when a company takes the time to incorporate rich media into their conversations, so this is an excellent addition that shouldn’t be missing from your arsenal.
You now have the basic set of tools to create powerful and engaging conversations, but your work doesn’t stop there. Popular live chat tools give you transcripts, which you should read to gather customer insights. This is where you’ll learn the most and gather valuable information that you’ll use to improve your user experience.
Leverage your transcripts to make the most out of your live chat service.
Your live chat experience will be as good as the service you choose. If you’re looking for a reputable option on the market, check out Chatway.
Measuring and Optimizing Live Chat Performance
The last step in this guide is to measure how successful your efforts are. There are many metrics you must keep in mind, and calculating them will help you determine whether your strategy is working or if you should adjust it.
These metrics include:
- Total chats
- Missed chats
- Average chat duration
- Average resolution time
- Response time
- Agent utilization rate
- Chatbot performance
- Customer satisfaction
- Website traffic
- Operator rating/feedback
- Average queue time
Two of the most important metrics are chat response times and resolution rates. They will determine how effective your live chat experience is and whether your customers are satisfied with what you’re doing. If something isn’t working, you should find out what’s causing the issue and improve those times as quickly as possible.
One thing that will help you improve is reading your chat transcripts. As mentioned before, these transcripts hold valuable insights that will help you when planning your next strategy. How do you analyze transcripts, though?
Make sure to create a proper management strategy. Categorize your chat transcripts into opened and resolved. This will help you get a better idea of what you’ve already checked.
Another thing that helps is using tags and labels for your chat sessions. When looking for chat transcripts, this will make it much easier to find what you want.
When analyzing the transcript itself, look at how the customer responded and how they felt with each interaction. Check how much time you took to respond and how that affected the customer. Also, identify areas where you would have benefited from using rich media.
Being aware of how your customer behaves will help you identify areas for improvement, so make sure to stay alert when reading transcripts. You can also compare different transcripts to see where they are similar or different.
Conclusion
Live chat is one among many customer support options that all businesses can use, including smaller ones. Modern live chat tools come with many useful features, which will give you a competitive edge. These include multi-channel messaging, integrations, and more.
By implementing the strategies on this blog, you will certainly make the experience much better for your customers. Of course, not all the benefits are for them. You’ll also maximize your live chat ROI.
All it takes is patience and building the right plan to ensure your success. With the tips we gave you here, you’re one step closer to achieving that goal.
There are many live chat solutions available today, so pick the one that best fits your business. If you don’t want to spend too much time looking, Chatway might be a great option that covers everything we mentioned in this guide. With its comprehensive set of tools, you can easily make your customers feel valued, giving you higher conversion rates in no time.
Use Chatway to streamline live chat conversations. Sign up for free today.
