Selling 24/7 Live Chat
Live chat is becoming more and more popular on websites – and for good reason. They add tremendous value to the bottom line.
Live chat is becoming more and more popular on websites – and for good reason. They add tremendous value to the bottom line.
Generally speaking, it’s been the larger companies that have deployed live chat because larger companies already have a customer service call center. For small and medium businesses who don’t have a call center, staffing their own live chat has been unattainable or the efforts have failed.
Here are some observations from our 18 years working with all types of small and medium sized companies of why chat has been difficult to deploy.
Some companies have attempted to staff a live chat software with their employees. We’ve only seen two or three cases over the years in which this has worked.
Here are the challenges for companies trying to staff a live chat themselves:
One of the most important factors for live chat success is website traffic. The higher the website traffic, the more chats your client will get. On our end, we’ll have to be sure we deploy appropriate human resources so that we are able to engage all the website visitors. You’ll want to find out early on in your discussions what the average traffic per month is. Then, we’ll be able to work with you (and your client) to determine which chat tier they require.
Here’s something else to consider when discussing a 24/7 live chat solution with your client: Product or service complexity. Obviously, more complex companies require a more customized approach and we have higher-level human resources to be able to engage and convert visitors in these situations. Once you get the initial questionnaire back from your client, we’ll be able to have that exploratory conversation to determine which of our chat operator resources will need to be deployed.
Some of the considerations which can make the process more complex are: