Five Best Practices fro Live Chat - By: Bruce Archer

There’s no debating how efficient a live chat program could be to help improve your live support quality. Whether you’re a live chat pro or whether you’re just beginning to implement your live chat programs, there are some basic best practices that you can use to make sure that you’re using live chat in an optimized way and making a positive influence on your live support.

1. Starting from Where Your Customers Abandon Your Website: A great way to begin a live chat program is to review your own website analytics firstly. Whether you use Google Analytics or another enterprise level solution, identify pages on your website that have a high bounce (exit) rate or where you need to improve conversions or sales. Those pages that are underperforming in your metrics reports are a great place to begin live chat to improve website performance.

2. Use Proactive Chat Instead of Reactive Chat: While any form of live chat technology used on a website will improve overall conversion and customer activity, using proactive live chat rather than reactive live chat can increase ROI to up to 105% according to a Forrester Research study. Reactive live chat is when you rely on interested customers to click your live chat button. Proactive live chat is when you actively extend invitation to users to begin a chat session based on various criteria. Comm100 offers both standard live chat Auto Invitation functionality and improved Intelligent Auto Invitation functionality to create the most customized invitations possible.

3. Customize Chat Content Based on Unique Criteria: If you are using proactive live chat, then be sure to customize your chat invitations to be specific to the user experience. If you’re using a standard live chat auto invitation feature, then you can set basic parameters. If you are using Comm100’s exclusive Intelligent Auto Invitation, then you can refine invitations using multiple criteria such as the user’s state, region and so on. This gives you the ultimate ability to craft a highly customized, high-converting chat invitation for optimal results.

4. Don’t Over Personalize Messages: You want users to feel a personal, welcoming sense from your message. However, you don’t want them to feel as though you’re spying on them! Avoid messages such as “We’ve noticed that you’ve been here many times on this same page. Can we answer a question for you?” Focus on personalizing based on information that wouldn’t make the user feel as though you know too much about them!

5. Grammar and Agent Skills Counts! In numerous studies, two factors mattered when creating a successful live chat program. The first is grammar and the second is the skill set of the agent. Comm100 Intelligent Auto Invitation for Live chat gives you the opportunity to send specific chats to the most qualified agent or group. Make sure to take advantage of that opportunity and also be sure to have somebody edit and check your auto invitation text for proper grammar and spelling.

Using live chat as a marketing and customer communications channel isn’t significantly different from using other live support channels in terms of how you can best optimize it. You want to combine knowledge of your visitors’ behaviors with creating tailored messages that speak directly to them. This could be based on the customer’s demographic data, website location, or even referral data. The more targeted that you make your message, and the better your trained agents are, the better your response rate will be.

About the Author

Comm100 is the leader in customer service and customer communication software. We are the #1 fastest growing company among all the companies we can find in our industry. Comm100 fully integrates multiple communication channels, including Live Chat, Email Marketing, Forum, Knowledge Base, Ticket and Help Desk. For further information about Comm100, please visit: http://www.comm100.com/.

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