Adding Live Chat to your Website Can Increase Conversion Rate
January 4, 2010 
5 Comments
If you are looking for some new ways to increase conversion rate on your ecommerce website, have you thought about adding a Live Chat option? Live chat is a great way to interact with your customers and potential customers to answer any questions they may have or recommend products based on their needs. Not only is it a cost effective way to handle customers, but it can also lead to a better conversion rate.
There are many different companies out there that provide live chat for websites. Most are hosted, but there are a few that you can run from your own server. If you are just starting out in live chat, then a hosted solution is probably the best. You will most likely have to pay monthly for the service, but some offer discounts if you pay for the whole year. This is not recommended unless you know that live chat will work on your site and you are happy with the service provider. You will need to choose a provider that has all the features that you are looking for and provide quality support to you during integration as well as through your contract term. Some quality services include LivePerson, BoldChat, Provide Support, Velaro, and many more.
A recent study conducted at the end of 2009 showed that only 28% of website visitors actually want to call or email a company for information. Most would rather find the information on your website. With Live chat, you can easily track your visitors and provide them with a pro-active chat box if they have any questions. This can lead to happier customers and an increase in conversion rates. If you can easily catch the customer in the buying cycle or solve their questions, then they are 15 times likely to complete a purchase with you. This can result in large jumps in conversion rate and sales.
Adding live chat to your website is not just a simple addition of code and you are off and running. You should do some A/B testing for the right placement of your live chat button/icon to see which one is used more often by the customers. You will also need to train your customer service staff in order to provide them with the correct skills to operate a chat with potential customers. Customers like answers fast, so making sure your live chat agents can provide them is key to succeeding with a live chat program. Most services allow you to put in common answers to questions along with common phrases that your company may use. They can be accessed by a click of a button, which decreases the time that they agent will need to type it out, allowing for a faster conversation and hopefully leading to a completed sale.
Live chat is often overlooked because some people find it annoying and others do not even see it. There have been numerous studies out there that have shown the decrease in call center costs when switching to a live chat based customer service option. Companies can increase their agents productivity by allowing them to do both phone and live chat. So if you or your company is looking for a cost effective way to increase conversion rate, try out live chat and see how your customers react.
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OggChat (http://www.oggchat.com) is another live chat service provider to mention as it is focusing on integrating with instant messengers, such as Google Talk, and mobile phones so that users can respond to customer inquiries even when they are not in front of their computers.
Very interesting. I am going to do some split testing on a few sites and see if this helps improve conversion rates as you indicate. Thanks.
Let us know how it goes.
LiveChat’s report show that the personal invitation is 3 times more effective than regular graphic invite displayed on the website:
http://blog.livechatinc.com/2010/08/how-to-increase-sales-conversion-with-live-chat-software/
I believe it. Personal invites should always be better than just a standard invitation.