Live Chat Best Practices in 2018

CHICAGO - Aug. 29, 2018 - PRLog -- Using live chat on your business website can keep you from losing customers. Put it this way - half of U.S. online adults will abandon their online purchase if they can't find a quick answer to their questions. In other words, live Chat can help you convert and boost your sales.

Corporate Business Solutions consultants recommend reading through the following live chat best practices.

Make it easy to use

Sometimes, the service chat is not easy to find. In many cases, users must sift through the "Contact Us" section to find chat or fill out a form before even beginning a chat session. You should put chat functionality on every page of your website or at very least the pages where customers are most likely to have questions.

Be proactive

Reactive chat simply means that the customer must find the chat tool on the website and initiate the chat. Proactive chat, in contrast, reaches out to engage customers even when they haven't asked for help. Of course, the latter is the better option. You can add proactive chat to specific pages where customers typically have questions or set up triggers so that a chat window opens after a customer spends a certain amount of time on the same page.

Be responsive and communicative

The whole essence of live chat is to reply to customers quickly, so make sure your chat is set up to do just that. Just starting the chat with a simple "hello" response lets the customer know there's someone on the other end of the line. Once the conversation begins, customer service reps should communicate with customers throughout the process.

Use internal chat

When you fuse together customer service live chat and internal chat tools, your customer service employees can ask each other inquiries, collaborate on assisting customers, and otherwise be more efficient. Internal chat can also be used it to "broadcast" alerts or messages to the entire team, which saves time.

Enable shortcuts

The chat tool you ultimately choose should allow your chat agents to quickly type routine messages with just a couple of keystrokes. For example, "Hi, this is John. How can I help you today?" This not only preserves time, but it also helps keep messages typo-free, so your business looks more professional.