How to Create a Live Chat for Your Website

Live chat is a great way to communicate with customers and prospects. It allows sales representatives to respond to the right questions at precisely the right time. This helps increase sales and enhances customer service.

Before I begin to explain the steps you need to add a Live Chat to your website, let me clarify the difference between Chatbots and Live Chat.

How is Live Chat Different from Chatbots?

A chatbot can communicate with your website visitors through planned or AI-powered conversations. Chat between the customer and a human representative of your company takes place on the other side.

You can use chatbots or live chat in your strategy. But both are important. These strategies often work together. It is possible to have your chatbot collect information and send it to live agents so that they can answer visitors’ questions.

Live chat is a great way to increase leads for your sales team. Sales reps can quickly answer customer questions while still speaking with prospects that are further along in their pipeline.

But first, let me guide you through the steps to adding LiveChat to your site.

How Can You Add Live Chat to Your Website?

1. Select your live chat program and research it
2. Modify your live chat widget
3. Place the live chat on Your site and strategically on your webpage(s)
4. Add sales reps to your live chat
5. Integrate LiveChat into your CRM (and any other business tools)
6. Get live chat customer feedback and analyze it
7. Plan your sales conversation flows

1. Select your Live Chat program and research it

Chatbots can save reps time by adding them to your web pages. They can answer questions, book meetings, and qualify leads. You can also personalize chatbots to pull information from your CRM Contact Database.

If your reps are not available 24/7, you can let them know by chat. Visitors will be able to see when your site is open for support.

There are many to choose from, here is a list of 12 Free Live Chat services.

Integrate your CRM to ensure all customer communications are in one location.

Many tools make it possible to chat live with potential customers online.

You can start to find the ideal tool by first deciding what live chat features you want. Look for tools that provide the features which you are most interested in (and which you can afford). Here’s a feature of HubSpot Live Chat Software, for example:

• The integrated and simple-to-use chat builders make it easy to quickly set up a live chat system.

The Conversations Inbox allows you to interact with prospects or customers in many ways. You can send emails, respond to chats, and schedule meetings.

The live chat widget must match the style of your site. Your web pages should have targeted welcome messages. These pages will open to specific audience segments, so you can reach them when they’re already on your website. This will increase conversion rates.

You can auto-save chat conversations with all contacts through the tool’s Conversations Inbox. You will also be able to save the conversation’s timeline.

HubSpot’s Slack integration allows you to choose between receiving notifications about chats in progress via Slack and responding to these messages via Slack.

2. Modify your Live Chat widget

Once you have installed your software, customize the chat widget’s appearance to match your website.

Here are some options you have to customize your live chat widget.

• The widget’s appearance
• The welcome message of the widget
• The language options of the widget

3. Place the Live Chat on Your Site and Strategically on your webpage(s)

Once you’ve chosen your software, the setup process should be straightforward. The live chat software you choose will usually give you a small piece of code you can copy and paste to your website. Most live chat software also requires step-by-step instructions.

Then strategically place the widget on your webpage. You can have a live chat on both your pricing page and your blog. Is it essential that the chat pops up only after someone has been to a page for a specified amount of time or right away? Or would you prefer that your live chat appears on all your websites with different greetings?

You should remember that site visitors come to varying stages of their buyer’s journey. Different greetings are necessary for each page. For example, the greeting you display on your Pricing page must be different from the one on your Contact Us page.

If you tailor your live chat strategy to suit the buyer’s journey, the chat will better support the needs and wants of that particular page.

4. Add sales reps to your Live Chat

This is an essential part of your process. Once you have set up the chat, you will assign chats to sales reps, and then you will need to teach sales reps how to use the software.

Depending on your live chat software, you may be capable of manually triaging these live chat messages, or you will assign them to your team members.

HubSpot’s LiveChat tool defaults so that all inbound conversations are not assigned in your inbox. This allows your team to triage.

5. Integrate Live Chat to your CRM (and all other business tools)

If you’re looking to use Live Chat software, make sure to integrate it with your Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) or other sales tools.

This will allow for more efficient interactions, with no need to hop between screens and tools. The resulting communication records and transcripts are saved automatically, making it easy to search, organize, and share.

HubSpot’s Live Chat integrates directly into the CRM, so reps know who they are chatting with (prospect or long-term client, or a new contact) and are seeing any past interactions or purchases and notes.

6. Get Live Chat customer feedback and analyze it

Your prospects can speak to you by phone or chat to get the answers they require. Then, you can send them a survey to find out about their experience.

Do they like using live chat? Did they use it to help with their decision-making? Are they happy with the service, and how did it make their experience? You can use this survey to get feedback from live chat customers and improve your live chat strategy and customer service.

HubSpot lets you quickly send your customers a satisfaction or feedback survey. You can customize and automate the survey so that your contacts can quickly provide feedback. You can compile the survey-based feedback to offer more concrete insights. Keep your surveys short and sweet, another chance to impress.

7. Plan your sales conversation flows

Once your CRM has integrated your live chat software, plan the conversation flow for your sales reps. You can collect information from prospects at the beginning of the chat using a chatbot.

Pro Tip: Using the HubSpot Live Chat Software, you can create a conversation inbox to manage, conduct, share, and assign all conversations between your customers and visitors via chatbots, live chat, and more.

With this information, your sales representatives will ask the appropriate questions to help the customer.

Conclusion

As potential customers keep visiting your site, they will be asking questions about your product, its features, and other details if not already.

So you need a team that can answer them efficiently and solve any problem or issues that your customers may have. A sale is won or lost on friendly, prompt service from knowledgeable reps, you may not get a second chance.

When setting up your chat, keep in mind how you feel when using chat on other websites. Where they quick to answer? How helpful were they? Did they make you feel valued as a potential customer? Did the experience build trust with that company?

If you have a plan for how you wish your live chat to work, then you will end up with a system that keeps your customers happy and your business growing.

Thanks for visiting today. I hope I have answered some questions about systems for you to be in touch with your customers and get the results they desire.

Thinking about creating a website to build a business but not sure where to start. You can read about how to host your website here and get help with building a successful business.

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Warm Regards,

Lily Munday