Choosing the Right Live Web Chat Platform: Key Considerations
Today, live web chat has become an integral part of most business websites’ DNA. With the capability to provide instant engagement with site visitors and answer their questions in real time, it gives customers quick, convenient and seamless support throughout the customer journey. This means they’re more likely to ask the pressing questions via web chat to get quick responses before they escalate.
While live web chat was initially considered solely a customer support tool, this has since changed as purchasing behaviours have evolved. This has resulted in live web chat becoming an effective solution for sales and marketing, too – with 85% of B2B companies using live web chat for sales and 54% using it for marketing purposes, converting visitors to viable leads.
In this article, Anthony Platt, Global Team Manager at The Call Business, gives his thoughts on choosing and using web chat based on his experience of implementing and managing different systems for a wide variety of clients.
Key considerations for choosing your live web chat platform
There are a multitude of live chat platforms available that all come with their own set of shiny features, but to ensure you’re getting the best solution to meet your unique needs it’s helpful to understand which features matter most to you and which platform best meets your criteria.
That’s why we thought it would be helpful to run through some of the top considerations to take into account when choosing your web chat platform.
BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
As with any investment, you need to know what your business objectives are with live web chat. As we touched on above, live web chat can be a useful sales and marketing tool to have in your arsenal, as it can offer a lot more than just quick and convenient customer support.
Analysing the types of enquiries, you get online will help you to decide where web chat can be the most impactful. Whether it’s freeing up manpower with effective automation functionalities for FAQs or as part of a wider lead generation and qualification process, having a clear idea of your objectives will go towards meaningful business growth.
TYPES OF VISITORS
Before you begin, it’s helpful to do some research to get a better understanding of the types of visitors to your site and other important behavioural traits.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself when doing your research:
Are your visitors new or repeat customers?
Which pages do visitors enter your site on most frequently?
Which pages do your visitors frequent the most?
What behavioural traits do your visitors have? For example, a lot of time on product pages could indicate buying signals, while content downloads could suggest technical queries.
Depending on the answers to the questions above, you can look to tailor your live chat visibility and messaging accordingly. For instance, we’ve found that websites with a lot of repeat visitors, can benefit from a platform that allows them to adjust web chat messaging and visibility for different areas of the website to boost engagement and customer experience.
DATA STORAGE AND GDPR
All web chat platforms store the transcripts of the chats that take place. In most cases, you’ll be asking site visitors for their name and email address and/or phone number at the beginning of the chat. That information is classed as ‘Personal Data’ under data protection legislation, so it’s vital to understand where this data will be stored.
If your company is based in the UK or Europe, it’s not ideal for your web chat data to be stored in the United States, as many US data centres are NOT GDPR compliant. So, when UK and EU businesses are selecting a web chat platform, ensure that there is an option to store data in an EU datacentre and, when you configure your system, ensure you chose that option.
MANAGING SITE VISITORS
When a visitor reaches your site, it’s important to consider how and where you’d like to interact with them, as well as if they’re a new or repeat visitor. This will help to maximise engagement opportunities and ultimately provide the best possible user experience.
For one of our clients who manufactures a range of highly technical equipment, with customers who typically visit the site more than once during the purchase journey, we deployed the LiveChat web chat system. The client’s web agency installed the system, but we set up the chat parameters, rules and messaging. As a global organisation, they had built their website to offer various language versions to cater for their key audiences. We mirrored this by creating separate chat teams for each key language, and routing chats to the relevant team based on which version of the website the visitor was using.
As well as offering different language versions, LiveChat was programmed to open chat windows and greet visitors on various pages of the site, setting slightly different criteria for repeat visitors, which delivered effective results. From our experience, it seemed that once they realise the web chat function was available, they gravitated towards it and engaged quickly, which gave us a great opportunity to demonstrate excellent customer service from the outset.
TRAFFIC VOLUME
Traffic volume should also go towards informing your decisions on live chat features and resource requirements to manage it.
With any live web chat, it’s crucial to give a good customer experience and the last thing you want is to make the common web chat mistake of having customers asking to chat and then getting no response. But equally, you don’t want valuable resources tied up in repetitively answering the same basic questions.
To strike the right balance between manpower and live chat functionality, it can be beneficial to choose a platform with robust artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. This will allow you to program your web chat platform to recognise and answer repeat queries without human intervention. However, it can be set up to recognise when there’s a need to pass leads onto a real person for further follow up.
A real-life example of this was with one of our global clients. With heavy website traffic, they installed Drift, which uses artificial intelligence bots to manage the most frequently asked questions and problem enquiries. The idea is that the bots are set up to manage all the basic initial questions and problems which crop up, leaving the human resources to manage more complex conversations that are more engaged.
Striking the right balance between AI and human interactions
The power of AI definitely comes with a number of benefits to live web chat functionality. But it doesn’t negate the need for the ‘human touch’ entirely - as with most things, it’s about striking a balance the two.
ALLOW TIME TO LEARN
AI bots need time to “learn”. So, with the initial implementation, all queries still need to be handled manually to identify the most common queries and customer pain points.
This can be challenging in the initial stages if you’re dealing with large volumes of visitors asking the same question, like the Drift project above, as you still need to ensure they receive a rapid response. And for a multilingual site, it is optimum to respond in their native language.
Once you’ve gathered the FAQ data, you can programme the AI bots to identify and process them, ensuring that each bot chat offers a chat with a live person if required.
While this can be a slow and iterative process, we find it’s always worthwhile. Once the bots are programmed, they’re equipped to quickly answer the high volume, high funnel activity, freeing up resources to deal with the smaller volume of technical questions, requests for quotations and early-stage sales enquiries.
RETAIN THAT HUMAN TOUCH
Considering how much manpower you need to operate your web chat isn’t just about managing high volumes. It also has an impact on the level of customer service you deliver, as human intervention can be more effective in building brand awareness and user engagement.
While AI bots can be extremely helpful, you can’t beat a live dialogue with a real person to ensure you don’t completely remove the human element from your customer support. However, there are obvious cost and time implications to assigning resources to your live web chat platform.
To help find the right balance between AI and human interaction, outsourcing live web chat resources could be a cost-effective solution – particularly if your business operates in multiple languages and time zones.
How outsourcing strengthens the human element?
AI responses inevitably sound scripted because they are. However, you don’t want your in-person chats to feel like that. At The Call Business, we specialise in making our customer interactions authentic and natural by giving our team guidelines rather than rigid scripts to work from – this allows the conversation to flow and their personality to shine through.
In our experience, a warm, friendly dialogue draws out more questions from site visitors as they become more engaged. As a result, this rapport building process makes them more likely to move down the sales funnel towards a buying conversation.
At The Call Business, we avoid using auto-translate functions as they can cause issues with inaccurate translations. Instead, it’s always better to have a multi-lingual team working on a global project, which is more accessible with an outsourced global team. When we implement new web chat for clients, we typically go live in English and, once we have bedded the system in and have a good understanding of the chat volume, FAQs etc, we’ll involve the broader team who can engage site visitors in their native languages.
How can web chat contribute to business growth?
For many of our clients, we provide lead qualification – engaging with prospects who are displaying buying signals, such as downloading content, asking for information or starting a web chat. This means our clients’ sales staff can stay focused on qualified opportunities to sell, which is the best possible use of their time.
We give those unqualified leads some TLC, making sure they get the appropriate information and help they need, while also establishing whether there’s potential for any future sales opportunities. If there is, we pass it to the client as a qualified lead, and, if not, we retain contact and nurture the prospect until they’re ready to buy.
We can apply this same qualification principle to web chat, too. In its simplest form, if you install a basic web chat application, it greets visitors and offers a chat window on every single page of your website. Then based on the nature of the chat that ensues, the prospect can either be nurtured or prioritised as a qualified, hot lead if they’re looking to purchase.
For a more focused approach, it’s possible to target the high intent pages on your site – pages with pricing and product features – only offering a chat window to visitors on those pages. This will mean less web chats, but they’re likely to be further along in their purchase journey, therefore should be more likely to convert into a viable qualified lead and/or sale.
While a targeted approach can be effective in reaching the prospects with higher buying potential and reducing the resources required to staff your web chat, it can also mean you’re missing other opportunities to engage with customers.
Instead, if you demonstrate a high level of customer service to every visitor, you strengthen the perception of your brand from the outset, making a good first impression. Alongside an effective nurturing strategy, a holistic web chat strategy can deliver more positive customer engagements, increasing the likeliness of them remembering your brand and returning when they’re ready to make a purchase.
As lead qualification experts, The Call Business can help you implement and operate an effective live web chat platform that delivers excellent customer service and lead nurturing. To discuss your needs in more detail, get in touch with our web chat team today.