Five Things to Consider When Implementing Live Chat

Globally, live chat usage continues to grow year-over-year by companies across all verticals. And website visitors are more and more likely to use it – 2x more likely than two years ago, in fact.¹ This real-time communication channel provides website visitors with an engaging and satisfying experience, while its effectiveness increasing conversions and reducing support costs makes it a smart choice for businesses. If your company doesn’t offer live chat today and is looking to expand into this channel, you may be wondering where to begin.

Here are five things we recommend considering when building your live chat business plan:

1. Who is your target audience? – Depending on your business, you may decide to target your web traffic for sales-related chats or use chat as a support tool. You may even decide to do both. Knowing who you want to chat with and what the conversations will be based on will help establish goals.
2. What are your goals?– From increasing average order values and lead acquisition rates through sales chats or increasing the utilization of agents handling multiple support engagements, there are a variety of goals to consider.
3. Who is going to be answering chats?– Whether you have army of one or a call center of many, who staffs your chats is one of the most critical pieces to ensure a positive chat experience for your site visitors.
4. Where are you going to place chat? – Visibility of chat on your site is key to its success. Keeping your goals in mind, you will want to consider how you use chat in areas such as the shopping cart or support pages and where chat button placement works best.
5. What is the cost of not offering chat?– From missed revenue opportunities to being a competitive differentiator to inflated support costs, there is a hidden cost of not providing chat on your site that may be greater than you think.

As you start to build your live chat business plan, we hope these considerations give you the necessary guidance to begin taking action. If you want to learn more, check out this recent ICMI on-demand webinar.

This blog was written by Coty Smith, Senior Solutions Consultant for BoldChat by LogMeIn

¹ Where Contact Centers Are Missing the Mark with Customer Care, Ovum, 2015