Key thoughts on choosing and using webchat

Thoughts on choosing and using webchat

Today, it is very rare that you visit a website that does not have a webchat function available. Webchats are now one of the most important tools available to help convert website traffic into your next customers. Once considered solely as a customer support tool, purchasing behaviour has evolved, and sales and marketing leaders now use webchat to convert visitors into leads as well as offer support and service to their existing customers.

Webchat gives instant engagement with your site visitors and enables you to answer questions in realtime. Visitors are far more likely to ask their pressing questions via webchat and the fact that they can get answers quickly and easily means issues can be resolved before they escalate.

In the remainder of this article, Anthony Platt, Global Operations Manager at The Call Business, gives his key thoughts on choosing and using webchat based on his experience of implementing and managing different systems for a wide variety of clients.

How does webchat help manage repeat visitors?

In a recent project using the multi-lingual version of the LiveChat webchat system, we found that the engagement levels increased as time went by. Our client manufactures a range of highly technical equipment and most of their customers visit the site more than once as part of their purchase journey. Their web agency installed the system but we set up the chats, greetings etc ourselves.

We programmed LiveChat to open chat windows and greet visitors on various pages of the site, and set slightly different criteria for repeat visitors. We got great results with the repeat visitors: it seems that, once they realise that the webchat function is available, they gravitate to it and engage quickly. This gave us a great opportunity to demonstrate really good customer service right from the outset.

How do you manage your resources to man webchat?

Depending on the level of traffic you have on your site, you need to make sure you choose the right webchat system and have the manpower to manage it. It’s crucial to give a good customer experience and the last thing you want is customers asking to chat and getting no response.  But you also don’t want valuable resources tied up in repetitively answering the same basic questions.

One of our global clients, with heavy web traffic, recently installed Drift, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) 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 conversations which are more engaged.

What you need to be aware of is that the AI bots need time to ‘learn’. As part of the implementation, everything initially has to be handled manually to establish what the site visitors are asking for help with and which questions and problems keep cropping up. On our recent implementation, this was a tough, mind-numbing, couple of weeks with huge volumes of site visitors all asking the same questions over and over again in various languages. And we had to make sure that everyone got a rapid response, in their native language, with the help they needed. But once we’d established the most frequently occurring issues, the AI bots were programmed to deal with those issues, ensuring that each botchat offered a chat with a live person if required.

It was an iterative process and was well worth it as, once they were programmed, the AI bots were able to answer all that high volume and high funnel activity, freeing up the team to deal with the smaller volume of technical questions, requests for quotations and early-stage sales enquiries.

Does webchat still have the ‘human touch’?

Handled correctly, webchat can offer the human touch and bring your brand to life. Although AI bots can be extremely helpful, you cannot beat a live dialogue with a real person. Webchat offers the chance to really build engagement with your site visitors and turn them in to customers. We give our team guidelines but they are not scripted so they still have authentic dialogue with our clients’ site visitors and let their personality shine through as they converse naturally. A warm friendly dialogue will draw out more questions from the site visitors: people are sometimes reluctant to sound stupid but the more comfortable they feel with the conversation, the more they will open up. And the more they engage, the more likely they are to move down the sales funnel towards a sales conversion.

Although it is tempting to use the auto-translate function, it’s always better to have a multi-lingual team working on a global project. When we implement new webchat for clients, we usually go live in English and, once we have bedded the system in, we’ll involve the broader team who can engage site visitors in their native languages.

How can webchat help grow sales in my business?

For many of our clients, The Call Business provide lead qualification. We engage with prospects who are displaying buying signals – they have either downloaded something, asked for some information, or started a webchat. We provide those unqualified leads with some TLC, we make sure that the prospect gets the information and help that they need and we establish whether there is an opportunity for the client to make a sale in the foreseeable future. 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 are ready to buy. This means that the clients’ sales staff can stay focused on qualified opportunities to sell, which is the best possible use of their time.

We can apply this same qualification principle to webchat too. In its simplest form, if you install a basic webchat application, such as PureChat, it greets visitors and offers a chat window on every single page of your website and then, based on the nature of the chat that ensues, the prospect can either be nurtured if they are at the early stages of the buying cycle or prioritised as a qualified, hot lead if they are looking to purchase.

It is possible to take a more focused approach, however, and the easiest way to do that is to target the high intent pages on your site – pages with pricing and product features. If you set your webchat to only offer a chat window to visitors on those pages, you will have less webchats, but they are likely to be with web visitors who are further progressed in their purchase journey and these will have a higher rate of conversion from webchat to hot, qualified lead and/or sale.

This will reduce the number of chats you have and the amount of resource you need to staff your webchat. Bear in mind, though, that by only offering webchat to visitors who look as though they are already nearly ready to buy, you are missing an opportunity. If you demonstrate your high level of customer services to all website visitors, there will be more who, if nurtured properly, might be more inclined to buy. If you have the resources available to engage with all visitors and show them all how great your customer service is, you position your brand very well and make a great first impression. Many buyers peruse the market place in broad terms as the first step in their purchase journey and you never get a second chance to make a first impression!