Keys To Successful Chat

Learn how to get the most out of your online support chat. We offer this free guide written by Nveevo's Managing Director, one of the leading innovators in the online support chat space. This guide will serve as a resource to both users of traditional chat support software and companies who have made the jump to next generation customer care. We hope you find it useful.

Positioning Your Button
One of the most imporant things to remember whether beginning to explore online support chat or looking for ways to improve your existing chat, is where you put your chat buttons. Notice I said "Chat Button(s)" plural. Many simply place a button on their home page. I will talk more about this later on.

Chat buttons are most effective when placed at eye level. Placing your button where the user must scroll down to see it could potentially yield you no results. Many companies find that by simply repositioning their button, they have seen "0" chats go to many.

Apart from the positioning on the page, is which pages you place it on. Place your button on the pages where users are most likely to have questions or arrive at peek interest before making a purchase. Placing buttons next to actual products is not a bad idea, but companies using support chat for pre-sales or the "last minute push" should most certainly have chat buttons on each and every sales targeted page. If you chat is for customer service or tech support, placing buttons on the frequently asked questions page or support oriented pages is appropriate.

The most important button you can place in your website, which most support chat employers neglect, is to place the button on your contact page. This is the fastest way possible for your customer to reach you. We musn't forget that.

Chat Invites
Thinking of using chat invites to generate leads, or walk customers through the purchase process? Before setting your chat software to "auto-invite" visitors, or spending countless hours inviting them yourself, it is important to remember several factors. First, if you are forcing a chat pop-up, most browsers will block it. Two, many users find invites to be intrusive or annoying. Finally, the actual results will be the users who's browsers allowed the pop-up and second, were not perturbed by your invitation. You actually run the risk of provoking the user to go to your competitors site. In most cases, chat invites don't work, or yield such a small number of results, it is not time/cost effective.

It Doesn't Have to be a Button
Think out of the box. There are many ways to be creative with support chat. You can display your chat support as a link, banner, or part of an image map. Being creative with your chat link suprises users and attract more clicks thus more conversions. Remember, its not actually a button, just a link.

You can also make your link, button, or banner multiple choice, where users can select languages, or select options which will route their chat to the appropriate person. This saves the user time and also gives a sofisticated feel to your online support channel.

Make It Your Prioirty, You Will Convert More
I have heard, on more than one occasion, web designers saying that the button was to big, or integrating it into the header takes away from the design. We have to remember what is the object of our page. It most cases, it is to make a sale. Since we already know that users which click the chat button are more likely to convert, and make an instant purchase or later purchase, why wouldn't we want the chat support option to be one of the most attention calling objects on the page? The answer is, for sites using live chat for pre-sales, you want it to be the most attention grabbing object on your page.

Go Global
What a pleasent suprise it is when companies begin experimenting with online chat and discover an whole world of business that they never knew existing. I'm talking about international clients. Business owners are only beginning to realize that the new way to buy is no longer limited by geographic location.

Some companies offer products or service which are in demand internationally, and the company itself never realized this before they began receiving international chats around the clock. Remember, when its day time in New York, its night time in London. Other companies offer services or products which might not necessarily be sold internationally, but there might be individuals looking to relocate or travel to your market, such as a real estate agent looking to sell a home to a family moving from overseas, or a tour company looking to sell an adventure package. The best way to determine if there is international demand for your product or service, is to try making your chat available 24 hours.

Don't Forget The Other Zones
Many countries such as the United States have multiple time zones. You might be missing out on customer from California trying to chat with you at 3pm pacific time, if you close at 5pm eastern time. Extending your chat hours if you have customers or potential customer in additional time zones can increase sales and improve customer service.

Understand Your Peek Times
As much as we might like to have visitors to our site behave in a certain way, the internet will quickly teach you that that is not the way it works. Many companies start off offering chat during their normal business hours assuming that customers will visit their website during those hours. In some cases this might be true for primarily business to business oriented company, however a very BIG mistake is making this assumption for business to consumer oriented companies.

What do you think the consumer is doing while your at work attending chats? Well, your customer is probably doing just that, working. Peek internet surfing times are on evenings, weekends, and holidays, when you are most likely not attending your chat. Don't forget that most people do there surfing in the evening when they get home. If this applies to your business, consider making your chat available during non-traditional working hours. The only way to find out is to try it. Most companies find that the bulk of their chats are received during evenings, late night hours, weekends, and holidays.

Learning What Service To Provide
There are many different ways to use support chat, pre-sales lead capture, pre-sales FAQ, pre-sales last minute push, customer service, and technical support just to name a few. Offer different types of support chat services on your website, and measure the results. The support type (or combination of support types) that bring you the highest ROI might suprise you.

Listening to Your Customers
It could amaze you what you can learn by listening. Chat is a great way to do just that. By expanding your hours to reach customers that you might not have been in communication with before, and because of the textual nature of chat (easy to review and measure in bulk), you could learn some interesting things about how to better shape your business or product offering, or most importantly, what you customers actually want.

Expand Your Market
How convenient it is that many business forget that the largest minority living in the United States is now Hispanic Americans. Some cities in the United States have larger spanish speaking populations than english speaking. Other cities have become dual language adding Spanish as an official second language.

Similar sub-cultures and diversities existing in other countries as well. By adding chat in additional languages and offering the native language of a visitor to your site, you persuade the visitor to stay on your site, rather than moving on to your competitor. You also open a market for those who might not speak your primary language, which might the only one offered by your competitors.

Preliminary Questionaires
Preliminary questionaires are great for collecting lead information, or just a small amount of information to get the chat started before actually initiating the session. They are great, but great for whom?

Many users after clicking a chat button and receiving a questionaire will then simply close the window, thinking that the operator was not available, or simply viewing it as not giving them what you promised (a live person). For customer service oriented chats, the questionaire will not be such a deterant and won't cost you a possible sale, however for sales oriented chats, I do not recommend the questionaire. In my experience, you loose more chats than you received due to customers closing the windows. The one absolute NO NO if you insist you having the pre-chat questionaire, is making the fields required. The fields should never be required. This allows the user to quickly click through if they do not want to give you any information before hand (which many visitors will not even do in the actual chat session so how can you expect them to before).

Don't Worry, They Will Wait
One of the great things about chat is the no pressure environment that it provides for the visitor. Chat is so effective because it is instant and comfortable. A chatter can eat a sandwich, watch a television program, or work on a document, all while receiving the human contact they are seeking. This means that the chat operator doesn't have to respond in a chat session, in the same way that they might need to respond in a telephone conversation. Most customers like this, and don't mind waiting for the next line of text to pop up.

Specializing Your Chats
Once you have identified which type(s) of chat support provide the highest returns for your company, you can maximize the returns by making sure the right people are handling the right types of chats. This might require having multiple chat buttons, or an interactive link that routes the chat to different operators. For examples, a salesperson might better attend a pre-sales chat, while customer service would be better suited for customer service chats.

The Preferred Contact Method
If you haven't noticed yet, after implementing support chat on your website, you will find that it is the preferred support meathod by visitors. In general, users prefer live chat over contact forms, telephone calls, and sending emails.