Yes, extremely. We get just as many leads through our website’s live chat feature as we do from phone calls. It also seems that the visitors who chat with us are further into the buying process for whatever reason.
Live chat offers a number of advantages over the phone for us:
- It’s really nice being able to think through what you are going to say. “Delete” just isn’t possible over the phone and being able to read through a response before hitting “submit” is sometimes priceless.
- You can still multitask. Talking on the phone requires more attention. Prospects on our live chat can ask questions as needed and we are free to work on other things in the meantime.
- We can offer after hours support without being at the office. The particular live chat client we use, Alive Chat, can send chat notifications to our mobile phones. In fact, I’ve had a number of chats on my iPhone. One of the major reasons we went with Alive Chat over its many competitors is that it has a great Mac app.
- The chat history is saved and becomes part of the clients file. We are collecting information that stay with the client throughout the buying process and after. Notes taken during phone calls on paper tend not to make it that far.
- Auto compilation of frequently asked questions. Our chat history gives us data on what information we need to better integrate or highlight on our website.
I recommend putting a live chat on your website to all our clients – especially if your site has a medium to low volume of visitors. You’ll connect with prospects you otherwise wouldn’t.
Other Posts
Loading…
Related posts:
- Discover Exactly What Matters to Your Prospects Every business owner wishes they could get inside the head of their prospect and learn exactly what specific benefits of...
- Testing out Squidoo One part of being a virtual assistant is staying current on internet trends, services, and websites so that we can...
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
We’ve tested Live Chat on our site and intially it sounded and worked fine, BUT, it soon became apparant that to manage the live chat was a problem as we couldn’t sit there waiting for people to chat with us – day in day out.
Also we found that if we proactively approached people to chat, then they soon left the site, just like when you get a sales assistant pester you in a shop!
We did get some good chats, that resulted in some actually sales enquiries and probably a sale or two, but we also got kids messing about and I even got chatted up twice by teenagers (at least I think they were).
We then tried outsourcing the chat work to people across the world, but the quality of the chats was poor and inconsistant. language can be a problem.
On the whole, unless you have a full time workforce that can manage chat in addition to say phones, it just doesn’t work – not for us anyway.
Peter
Hi Peter —
Thank you for the comment. Yes, we noticed the exact same thing about forcing a pop-up (people tend to leave when you do that).
Are you aware of our company? Might solve the manpower problem you are having.