Live chat tips and techniques to grow your business

Is your team having a difficult time adjusting to a live chat tool? It’s one of the best conversational tools, but it will only provide positive results when used to its best potential. 

Live chat is the new and advanced tool for communication, one that’s fast, reliable, and personalized. However, if your team is new to live chat, it’s better to give them a rundown of its uses and benefits. 

So, before adopting live chat, there are various techniques and tricks that you must know to perform your best. This article lists the 15 best live chat practices and how they can help you provide an enhanced customer experience. 

1. Live chat as a lead generation tool

Yes, you read that right! 

Live chat can help you generate leads, and that too at 3x more speed. 

As live chat is a tool that connects the visitor with a company in real-time, it provides you with an opportunity to leave a lasting impression on your prospect. 

You can use live chat, bots for welcome messages, and messengers to stay connected with your visitors at every touchpoint. Moreover, by segmenting your audience in a user group and qualifying them, you can start a contextual conversation by assigning the lead to the right team member. 

A CRM with lead management feature offers auto-assignment of leads and provides a 360-degree view of all your contacts so you can develop lasting relationships. 

2. Personalize every conversation 

If you want to connect with your visitors and customers, you need to have a personalized conversation. Even when you’re sending bulk emails or sending product updates, you need to go the extra mile and personalize that message. 

52% of customers view the company more favorably when the customer service is more personalized to them and their interests. 

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You can send personalized messages with your client’s name on the message, and if you want to target a specific target audience, you can also segment the leads. Divide your leads based on their preferences and send emails or texts with a different subject. 

Visitor behavior maps are perfect for finding out in which area your visitors are more interested in. Visitor mapping tools highlights the are most popular areas on your website and gives insight into every customer’s previous website visit, which pages they browsed, and the time they spent on it. These tools enable you to understand the consumer behavior at micro level so you can alter your approach towards your prospects. 

A/B testing in marketing campaigns is a great way to study the customers’ preferences, and personalization takes it up a notch. 

3. Measure conversation metrics for team performance 

Live chat is not just a conversation tool; it goes beyond and provides detailed insights as well. Every team member has a different quality and productivity, and live chat enables you to measure your team members’ performance.  

Know how they’re interacting with visitors and the amount spent on each conversation to evaluate the engagement level. Live chat is an essential tool for engaging with customers and analyzing how it’s performing. You can see which team member is bringing more leads and likewise, you can assign hot deals to them to shorten the sales cycle. 

4. Segment users

The best way to sell your product/service is to know what your customer wants.  

Every individual has different requirements when it comes to purchasing a product or service. We know that you’re confident about what you’re bringing to the table, but is it reaching the right person? 

To reach the right audience, you need to segment the users based on their actions and interests. Is your customer interested in purchasing a specific add-on, or do they want to get the full package? Use insights to know which page your customer is visiting and segment them into groups for a better user experience. 

For example, when your users are interacting via live chat, which is the most common page they come through? By finding out the route and understanding the needs of the users, you can optimize the page to eliminate any issue faced by your users. Moreover, you can also get insight into which customer support rep is performing the best by finding out how many customers made the purchase after chatting with your rep. 

5. Intelligent chat routing 

To capture more leads, it’s essential to connect them with the right rep. With live chat, you can auto-assign conversations to the team member by simply @mention, and they’ll be notified right away.  

82% of consumers look for an immediate response from companies on marketing or sales questions.  

Auto-assignment of conversations saves you time and helps solve customer queries quickly as they don’t have to stay on hold or repeat their information once again. 

Chat routing it highly for teams as they can easily collaborate, assign chats, and increase their productivity.  

6. Automated triggers

Engaging with visitors and prospects manually can be time-consuming; set up automated triggers that get activated on a specific action. Whether it’s onboarding emails, promotional campaign, or behavior-based marketing campaigns, automate the process and connect with prospects. 

For example, if your prospect comes up to you for assistance regarding resources, you can simply guide them to the download link. So, once the person clicks on the download link, an automated email with a personalized message and resource will be sent to their inbox. Here, clicking download acted as an action that triggered the email for resources.  

7. Chat widget customization 

One of the most vital aspects of adopting live chat is the widget’s customization and layout. You want the chatbot to represent your brand with which the prospect can connect with. 

By customizing the widget colors, its appearance, and the welcome message, you can encourage interactions and generate more quality leads for your company. 

8. Visitor tracking and analytics 

Want to connect with every visitor on your website? Then you need to send targeted messages based on the pages they visit. If it’s a product page, you can offer assistance and get your visitor familiar with its features. If they’re on a checkout page, you can add a customer support chatbot that provides last-minute help for placing the order. 

Tracking visitor’s browsing preference on your website reflects their interest, therefore you can develop a strategy based on their interests and send targeted messages that intrigues them to get the product or service. 

9. Voice and video chat  

Visitors want to interact with people, not bots. With live chat you can personalize your chats with voice and video chat options. Although voice chat is similar to a call, when the customer is chatting with you and still facing some issues, you can solve their query with voice chat. Or, if they’re willing to have a video chat, you can have personalized conversations to keep your customers satisfied. 

Video chat and voice chat improve credibility as the visitor can interact with a real person, not just a bot or a voice processing machine. 

10. Bring all your leads into CRM

No one wants to juggle between multiple platforms to get one task done. When you’re chatting with a visitor and showing interest, you will need to enter their contact details into your CRM. And you can do this without leaving your chatbox! 

Yes, you can add contacts and deals associated with them into your CRM from the live chat. You can enter the data while having a conversation with the lead and create a contact that will reflect in your CRM as well. 

11 Track and manage support tickets

A company that’s on the path of growth will attract many leads, and to manage all the incoming queries and questions, you need live chat that tracks and manages support tickets. Whether your prospect is coming from social media platform or email, you can provide quick solutions with canned responses. Preparing canned responses to commonly asked questions helps you save more time and resolve customer queries quickly.  

You can perform multiple actions on a ticket with just a few clicks and provide consistent responses to common questions. 

12. Qualify and engage leads 

Live chat tool plays a vital role in helping companies capture qualified leads and nurturing them. The interaction your live chat agents have with your prospects can make or break the deal. By providing relevant information to your prospects, solving their issues, you can guide them through the sales funnel to eventually convert them into customers. It’s crucial to target the leads that show immense interest in your product/service so you can deliver an exceptional user experience while interacting with them. 

Live chat is not just limited to providing support and product information; you can also execute sales and support processes across multiple communication lines such as live chat, video, co-browsing, web messenger without losing the context of the original message. 

13 Track your website visitors for a 360-degree customer view 

An intuitive CRM along with an advanced live chat tool enables you to track your website visitors, so you have a holistic view of your end customers. You can map out your strategies based on the custom attributes like buying behavior and triggered events to drive higher engagement. 

With a clear view of your contacts, you can track them on multiple platforms, analyze the type of content they’re engaging in just by using contact management so you can determine the best solution for them. Such valuable data insights on visitors can prove highly beneficial for your bottom line so you can personalize the conversations and provide custom solutions. 

14. Onboard your customers into one channel 

To deliver exceptional customer service, you can use live chat tool that enables you to bring all your customer interactions in a unified inbox. To provide a seamless onboarding experience to every user, you need to stay connected with them at every touchpoint. From solving common queries such as functionalities of a product or software, or providing assistance with technical issues, you can use live chat to solve queries within minutes and keep your customer delighted. 

When a user has a quick mode of connection with the company, they’re more likely to stay for a long time and refer to others as well. 

Moreover, you can insert saved replies, articles, and images to resolve common questions, drive engagement, and track the onboarding campaign performance. 

15 Consistent customer support quality 

The only way you can retain customers is to have consistency in customer support. 

Businesses lose 71% of customers due to poor customer service.  

So, ensure when you connect the visitors with support team, they are able to provide a best-in-class service and build strong connections with them. Live chat tool can help customer support teams to collaborate and deliver exceptional services to their visitors. From having internal chats, to assigning leads, creating contacts without leaving the live chat screen it makes communication process smoother for your team members. 

Conclusion 

Here is the list of top live chat software, opting for the best one can work wonders for your business, and with the right techniques, you can use it for much more than a customer support platform. You can engage with visitors, build a good rapport so you can eventually convert them into customers.