Live chat features are becoming increasingly common on websites. However, they have also been joined by chatbots – widgets that replicate the features of live chat but using bots and algorithms instead. Live chat is the superior approach from the perspective of lead generation – provided you approach it the right way.
Here are four ways of using live chat that are guaranteed to generate leads for your business.
Interact and Engage
The benefit of live chat is that it enables you to communicate with users in real-time. If you want this to be an effective lead generation tool, you need to use it correctly. When you communicate with your users, make sure to be engaging and keep things interactive. Don’t just provide users with stock responses, give them links to the pages they need and actively signpost them where they need to go.
Respond Quickly
This should be obvious, but it is worth repeating – you need to respond as quickly as possible. Internet users won’t hang around trying to fight with the clumsy interface of a poorly-designed and slow website, if you can’t give them what they want, when they want it, they will simply move on to the next online service to see if they can do better.
Make sure that you don’t implement a live chat system without a plan in place for ensuring that there is always someone there to respond.
Personalize the Messages
Some websites are opting instead for chatbots. These can be helpful but are not effective lead generation tools. This is in spite of the lightning-fast response times that they offer. The reason that chatbots are not as effective as an actual live chat service is that these bots can only ever give stock responses.
You can ask for a person’s name using a form and then have a chatbot address them by their name, but this isn’t the same as having a person open a conversation by introducing themselves, asking the customer’s name and asking how they can help. If you can use your live chat service to do this, you will have no trouble converting passers-through into new leads.
Partner With the Right Provider
As with any service that sells to businesses. live chat providers come in general and specific types. The general providers aim to be as broad as possible, providing solutions that can be integrated with systems in a variety of different scenarios. This is fine for websites who provide a variety of services or cater to a wide range of audiences.
Then there are businesses like HSBO – a company that specializes in providing live chat services specifically to businesses within the HVAC and plumbing sectors. Working with providers who specialize in your industry will often lead to more efficient lead generation than a general solution.
When they are deployed correctly and with purpose, live chat widgets have the potential to be transformative for a website. Live chat features, in general, will be as effective at generating leads as salespeople are at generating sales in a store.
