Can you read this question in your website visitor’s mind: “So, here I am, browsing this website. What’s next?”

No? You should feel bad now. There are two types of site visitors: those who actively engage with your website, and those who want to be engaged. If you’re just sitting behind the computer screen and wait for people to contact you, you’re wasting a huge number of prospective customers who don’t self-motivate to reach out to you.

There are many valuable benefits that a custom chat invitation like “Hi! What may I help you?” can bring you. Let’s dig into the benefits of proactive chat and how you can use it for your eCommerce business to gain more.

1. Use a live chat software that lets you customize/personalize proactive chat invitation

Let’s personalize proactive chat invitation

If you know that 62% of consumers who have used live chat on a website said it would be more likely for them to purchase again from that website which had live chat service, you will pay double attention in choosing a live chat service for your eCommerce website.

There are many things to do with live chat to fully explore its power, like customizing and personalizing the trigger (chat invitation) for site visitors. Luckily, there are quite many live chat providers include this function in their chat software, like Subiz.

My first advice for you is to use powerful live chat software which lets you take care of each visitor in the best way. The art of customer relation management is to be real to your customers, and let them know you are reaching to them in person. Hence, your chat invitation should be customizable, along with the name and real picture profile of the chat agent.

Plus, you should have the invitation translated into different languages, based on the location of people browsing your website. It will be more thoughtful and much more attractive for your site visitors.

2. Set time to offer chat

Set time to offer chat

Be timing in raising your chat invitation. Customers don’t always take the lead in initiating chat request to your support center so obviously you need to be the first to offer them chat window when they’re on your website. However, this doesn’t mean that you need to do it immediately with visitors.

Often, your website has some key call to action (CTA) buttons or messages to drive and navigate traffic for your sales or marketing purpose. If the chat window slides out right when people land on your website, it will distract your visitors from the main message of the website or confuse them because of many CTAs at the same time.

So, to solve this problem, you can simply let your visitors browse your website for a certain time, say – 10 to 30 seconds – before having the chat window appeared. This amount of time will avoid interrupting customer’s journey of exploring your website and be friendlier. Or, you can set up a list of pages on your site where you want to strike your customer’s purchase decision and add your chat invitation there as the last hit.

3. Don’t make your chat window popup like mushrooms

Making incentive for visitors to engage with your support agent is good. But too many chat incentives at once are called annoying.

Multiple chat offers will be immediately turned off by site’s visitors and in the worst case, sweep them away from your website. Don’t make people say “Bye bye”. Make them stay. Choose the pages where people are more likely to spend more time on and offer one single effective chat trigger.

4. Get to know customers with pre-chat survey

Know customers with pre-chat survey

An effective proactive chat should come with a pre-chat survey. Try it if you haven’t yet. It’s super valuable for your marketing agent to collect lead’s information for customer personas and build an effective lead nurturing campaign.

A pre-chat survey should contain basic information requests like visitor’s name, email, their occupation, or information they’re looking for, etc. This small tip is helpful for chat agent too because they’ll know which type of customers they’re going to serve and therefore, have a faster transference between agents who can handle customer’s incoming request most effectively.

Don’t ask too many questions though unless you want to rip off your effort of engaging site visitors.

5. Optimize chat button placements

The next thing you should be aware of is where to put your chat incentive CTAs. Usually, you should put your chat button in the most visible position of your website. For example, the upper right position which is above the fold so people don’t have to scroll down to see chat invitation.

Don’t limit chat trigger button on your home page only. Product pages or even in your email’s footer, chat incentive is necessary too to be one step closer to reach your customers.

6. Collect and analyze visitors’ chat data

Chat transcript feature is another important function that a good live chat software should have. Saving chat log from your customers as well as their information and behaviors on your website helps make a rich resource for your marketing campaign.
Don’t let all the collected data from customers go wasted.

Saved chat dialogues can help chat agents to react quicker to customer’s request without having them to explain their problems again.

Saved customer’s behavior data on website helps understand which content/information they are interested in and likely to ask about. Hence, your support quality will be better. And better support means better customer conversion.

7. Update your FAQs and guidelines with chat transcripts

Update your FAQs and guidelines

This is easy. From time to time, review your chat transcript library to identify the most popular problems that people usually request support from. The biggest and most frequent stumble should be brought into your Frequently Asked Questions section. And if it’s important enough or product-related, then update your userguides accordingly.

Better updated and rich FAQs or guidelines can help reduce the number of chat requests or at least, reduce supporting time for such request when support agent can link visitors to the information page they need.

Oh and don’t forget that your blog land will be more prosperous too with igniting ideas coming from customer’s questions via live chat! Helpful blog content is one of the important hooks that make people stay with you.

Be helpful and get the reward

There are countless reasons to use a proactive live chat – it’s money-saving for your eCommerce business, time-saving for your site’s visitors; it drives more sales; it offers you better chance to win in the competition with other stores; it helps you increase the time visitors stay on your site and reduces bounce rate, any many more.

Get it right with the 7 proactive chat tips above and you’re on your way to get the best first impression from your site visitors and make them stay longer. If you haven’t got a tap on using proactive chat, awesome chat service like Subiz will be a good choice to say “Hello” to your site’s visitors.

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