LiveChat best practices in 2021 - 9 Tips to Follow
Livechats are very powerful tools. In this article, we will explain how to successfully incorporate a livechat into your website. Let us guide you through live chatbest practices in 2021!
Livechats have a consumer satisfaction rate of 82% to 92% according to 99FIRMS. A livechat is a software that enables your customer service team to strike up real-time conversations with customers while they are visiting your company’s website.
In another article, we explained why you should definitely incorporate a livechat into your website.
Besides being customer-friendly, livechats also have many other benefits, they:
- increase the productivity of your customer service team
- help you increase conversation rates
- reinforce customer trust
- help you close more sales
- and much more...
Livechat Best Practices to follow in 2021
Carefully pick your livechat’s target and location
First and foremost, before even incorporating a livechat into your website, you will have to think about your targets.
- Who will be using your livechat?
- Are your targeting all visitors on your website or just your customers?
Defining a target will help you find the best location for your livechat on your website. In any case, your live chat needs to be easily visible.
Keeping this in mind, your live chat can be incorporated into your website’s landing page or product pages and appear in a popup window at the bottom right or left of the screen.
Popups are a great way to catch the eye, especially when they are animated. For example with a message like “Hello! How can I help you?” conveniently appearing. when your customer need help can increase your conversion rates
With Ideta’s software, you can also pick the size of the popup window and its colour.
Make it clear to customers that you are a real human
When customers choose to use a livechat, they want to be able to talk to a real human, not to a robot.
Try to make it clear to visitors and customers that your livechat enables them to ask their questions directly to your customer service team.
To do so, you can, for instance, have your employees’ picture as their avatar. Moreover, you can try to use emojis and punctuation to show happiness and friendliness. This will help you satisfy your customers and visitors, and build trust with them more easily.
Connect your live chat to your CRM software
Connecting your live chat to your CRM software will enable you to automatically collect information from visitors and customers who have a conversation with you.
By asking visitors for their contact details
- Email address
- Name
- Phone number
- and other info you may need
You will be able to automatically save this information in your CRM software. This will help you develop your prospect list and save you a lot of time.
Do not let your customers pending
According to studies conducted by CMSWiRE and HelpScout, livechats offer faster support to customers than emails and phone calls do.
For this to be completely true, it is necessary to use your livechat correctly by making sure to not let your interlocutors wait for your reply for too long.
If ever you need to make some research in order to answer their questions or requests, let them know and indicate how long they will have to wait to get an answer. Ask for their email address in case they have to go away so you will still be able to reach them, even when they leave your website.
Prepare your answers in beforehand
In order to be more efficient, you can prepare some of your answers ahead of time. For example, if you know what visitors’ frequently asked questions are, then you can prepare answers that your employees will be able to send directly and with just one click. This can be done trought the quick answer pannel on Ideta's livechat builder.
This will help you avoid mistakes, like accidentally sending different information to different people for the same question, and help you better standardise your customer service team’s communication.
Your customer will have to wait less, and your team will be able to save more time and energy.
Manage and assign conversations
When incorporating a livechat into your website, it is important to keep managing it. Assign conversations to members of your customer service team as they come. This way their work does not overlap and your user don't end up talking with four different agents at once!
Assign your team members to specific conversations. You give them the ability to easily follow up entire conversations instead of sporadically answering multiple queries.
This will help your support agents save time and customers won’t have to explain a problem over and over again to different team members.
By connecting your livechat to your CRM software, not only will your staff members handle a problem or query from beginning to end, but they will also be able to access customers’ informations and previous queries. They can take a quick look to past datas and better recall each customer and conversation.
This is all the more important given that about 72% of customers expect your service agents to remember their contact informations as well as their past conversations according to the Customer Think website.
Train your customer service team
Train your customer service team in order to get the best from your live chat.
Emphasize the importance of correct spelling and grammar, as mistakes can look very unprofessional. Tell your team they can also use emojis and punctuations to look more friendly and build trust more easily.
Also, make sure they don’t take more they can handle when it comes to customer requests and queries.
Ask for customers’ feedbacks on their conversation experience
Ask your visitors and customers for feedback on their experience with your newly incorporated live chat. This way you will know if they are happy with your service.
To do so, you can send them a survey at the end of each conversation. You can simply ask them about the overall experience or send them a more detailed feedback form for them to fill.
Getting feedback from visitors and customers will help you know what to improve regarding your livechat. Visitors and customers who have had a great experience with your livechat are more likely to come back.
Combine your livechat with a chatbot
To improve the customer experience even more, thanks to Ideta’s software, you can combine your livechat with a chatbot.
Chatbots are conversational agents programmed to instantly answer a user's questions. Combining your livechat with a chatbot will give you additional benefits like being available to answer customers’ queries 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and being able to answer in multiple languages.
Check out our article on chatbot best practices in 2021
To conclude, by following those livechat best practices, you can bring many benefits to your business if it is properly incorporated and used.
- Connect it with your CRM software
- Make sure to not let your customers pending
- Organise work well between the members of your customer service team
- Train your team
- ...and skyrocket your business!
Not convinced to incorporate a livechat into your website?
Learn more about the multiple benefits a livechat can bring to your business in our article Top 7 reasons why your business needs a livechat in 2021.
Interested in incorporating a livechat into your website? Send us an email at contact@ideta.io, our team will be pleased to help you!