Expert Tips For Use Chat on Website

While we personally love website chat options and believe that everyone should have them, there’s never been a better time than 2020 to set up a website chat service for your business, especially if you work in the B2B space.

Why? The answer to everything this year – the Coronavirus pandemic. 

As more and more businesses have been forced to send their tech support and customer service representatives home to work while their kids, dogs, neighbors’ lawnmowers, and other distractions are making loud noises in the background of business phone calls, website chat tools are a deal saver and help you answer customers’ questions despite having a customer service or tech support team that’s stretched thin. Continue reading to learn why we think you should be using a website chat app now.

• Website Chat Apps Let You Respond Faster and Generate More Leads

When was the last time you called a company’s customer service line? Let us guess. You were “greeted” by an automated voice, had to wait to see which option to press before you could get directed to the right department, and had to listen to some terrible hold music while you waited for a living and breathing person to actually answer the call. Calling customer service – or tech support – is terrible these days, isn’t it? It’s even worse during this pandemic, with many calls now being directed to cell phones with spotty service or homes with barking dogs in the background.

And if you think calling businesses is bad, emailing them is even worse. Some email messages seem to be sent and never responded to. Others take 48 hours to receive an automated message, even something as unhelpful as an email letting you know your support ticket has been added.

This isn’t the speed at which B2B customers, and even consumers, expect to communicate in 2020. It’s not even close.

Website chat apps, however, are a breath of fresh air these days, and much improved from the website chat tools of a decade ago that could take as long as 10 minutes to connect to. Today, businesses are using website chat services to rapidly respond to customers’ questions, helping them increase leads and stop online shoppers from abandoning shopping carts. The simple fact of the matter is if you aren’t using website chat options in 2020, you’re losing out on leads and sales.

• Chatbots Let You Answer Questions Even When You Can’t Personally Reply

In a perfect world, you and your team would be able to respond to every incoming website chat message personally.

However, that simply isn’t possible for small businesses or businesses that don’t offer 24/7 support, or employees temporarily working from home while also helping their kids with a virtual school.

Chatbots, however, help you answer customers’ questions even when you can’t personally reply. Modern chatbots are very intelligent and can detect question intent better than ever before. By having your website chat features programmed properly to identify common questions and resources that answer them, even a one-man shop can be giving answers to customers all night long, even at 3:13 am.

• Stop Online Shopping Carts from Being Abandoned (and End Other Objections, Too)

It’s estimated that anywhere between 60% to 80% of online shopping carts are abandoned. You can help retain more of those potential sales by providing your eCommerce or click and mortar customers with a quick way to communicate with you through your website chat app. Website chat tools can stop other common objections dead in their tracks, too.

First, webchat services allow your customers to get quick answers to questions they’d never resolve by checking your FAQs or entering in their question in your website’s search bar. Customers who have specific questions – or doubts – about your products can quickly get answers to their burning questions – questions that may have made them abandon their shopping cart if they weren’t invested enough in the idea of your product to spend time on hold calling your business or send an email and wait for a reply.

Second, website chat features allow you to be proactive in asking customers if they have questions before they even open up your website chat app. Many businesses are leveraging the advanced functionality in website chat options to customize push messages that are sent out on highly-trafficked pages, such as a product page, a popular blog post, and so on. When you ask people a question, they’re more likely to answer, and thus you’re able to initiate conversations and get customers who may have only been casually browsing your website more engaged.

• Web Users are Moving Away from Filling Out Forms

Sure, forms are a great way to capture lead data. But if you think people are going to fill out your online contact form to reach you just because you’ve listed it online, think again.

Today’s web users, especially Gen Z and younger Millennials, live in a world where they expect fast interactions.

They’d rather simply ask their question than fill out all the fields listed on forms just to send an email that won’t receive an immediate response.

Website chat options also incentivize your leads who want to stay anonymous – and off your email marketing list – from contacting you before they buy. Since they don’t have to give any personal information upfront, these leads are more comfortable reaching out to you when you offer website chat apps.

We Can Help You Incorporate a Chat App on Your Website

Since you’re reading this blog post on our website, you can see we practice what we’re preaching here. We have a website chat app, and we get great results from it.

We want to help you answer your customers’ questions more quickly too, and prompt leads to ask questions instead of bouncing off your site. As a full-service marketing agency that has a team of web developers, we can incorporate website chat apps into your website, and even recommend our favorite option.

For help with website chat options, call us today at (877) 682-2012 or chat us up on our own website chat app.

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