Should I Add a Live Chat function to My Website ?

So this week’s question seems to be all about Live Chat. Two of our long time Treehouse clients have asked us this, so here’s a few thoughts from us on the subject.

We’ve got it!

Now you can see that we have been running live chat on our site here for just over a year, maybe you’ve even used it with us.

We find it great as a ‘first touch’ for prospective clients. It seriously lowers the barrier of communication between a website visitors and our Monkey team.

When navigating any website, whether you are looking to get some more info on a  product or looking for support, how often have you been given the option to “live chat” with a customer support representative as an alternative to calling a phone number?

All the big global companies have been offering live chat support for many years now and for 53% of customers chat  – also known as “instant messaging” – is preferred. 

Who wants to wait on hold for 20 minutes to speak with a support representative, anymore?

Instant messaging is a better way for us to communicate with our client and potential customers than a phone number, but customers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from live chat. Marketers too can see a huge increase in leads and sales.  

86% of customers are willing to pay more for a good customer experience, and 89% of customers stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer experience.

RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report

As a tourism business owner, this is a sobering thought that highlights the importance of customer experience management and the role that Live Chat plays in keeping customers satisfied.

Reading all this, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “should I try this on my company’s website?” However lets be clear to the exact WHY you should be doing this, before actually jumping in and doing it.

On our site here we love and use Tawk.to for live chat
On our site here we love and use Tawk.to

What is the final goal of putting Live Chat on your Site?

Simply put there are VERY good reasons to start with Live Chat on your WordPress site. Our goals can be put succinctly as we wanted to:

  1. Convert more visitors to leads 
  2. Qualify leads by directly asking qualification questions
  3. Use a new channel to engage with hot prospects that are actively seeking answers and evaluating our product 
  4. Discover what information our website might lack or bury from our visitors

I imagine, if you’re reading this, your tour or hotel company’s objectives may be very similar. If you have the resources and time to test live chat, then you should.

Messaging might be the major focus of marketing and sales teams of the future. If you can start now and get really good at it now, then you’ll have a competitive advantage.

The key role that Live Chat plays is keeping your customers satisfied immediately. We live in  fast paced world, and the company who answers a queries while the prospect is in a shopping mood, will more likely land the sale..

What pages should you put live chat on? 

Your homepage probably gets the most traffic, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right place to add live chat. Consider key action pages like a pricing page, contact page, or a request booking info landing page.

These are the right places to try messaging because this is where visitors will have questions and have expressed some level of interest in your company simply by navigating there. 

Who will work your live chat?

The magic window to respond to a lead is 5 minutesaccording to Drift.

Chatbots are helpful to extract information from a visitor, but having a real human to answer questions is necessary.

Be careful though. You don’t want to roll out messaging to your entire  team all at once. Find one or two individuals on your team to work chat to evaluate its benefits.

What will measure success?

Getting many visitors to chat with you might not be the only measurement of success. Consider the objectives we outlined above.

  • What do you really want to achieve with Live Chat?
  • And what are the early indicators of success so you can determine if messaging is worth scaling up? 

I think messaging holds a lot of promise for marketing and sales of SME Tourism Products. It’s new and exciting, but it is also a little unproven ‘out in the wild’. So do think hard about it before just jumping in…

Key Takeaway

Overall, we have found that live chat can dramatically increase your number of leads and sales by eliminating friction and building trust very fast with new clients.

If you’re interested in live chat for your website, try our chat box in the bottom right corner and we’ll see if we can get you started 🙂

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