Ever considered getting live chat for your website but not sure what you’re getting into? If so, this is for you…
The growth of webchat is one of the success stories of the digital age, allowing businesses and website visitors to engage in ways that simply weren’t possible before. It’s been one of the key drivers behind the success of online sale, transforming faceless websites into places where consumers can get help and support, just like they would on the high street. It’s no wonder that so many businesses have signed up to this platform to enhance their websites, making it the number one platform above email and telephone.
With Live chat, customers’ have flexibility and the ability to multitask that a phone call can’t provide and unlike email, website visitors can expect their enquiries to be picked up immediately.
The only real sticking point that’s deterred website owners, particularly for small and medium organisations, has been trying to understand this relatively new technology, how does it work and how much does it cost? Here, we aim to cover the basics of what you need to know and to demonstrate that Live chat can be much cheaper and much more effective than you might think.
Understand what you’re getting
Free services
The cost of installing web chat onto your website starts at literally nothing. That’s right, you can find various freeware software packages simply by entering them into your search engine and some of them do exactly what they say on the tin. You simply install the software onto your site and away you go. As you’d expect, they come with some compromises though. Technical support is non existent so if you experience problems with your website, you will be on your own. It’s a similar story for updates, don’t expect any new or powerful functionality in the future for a free service. The appearance of the chat icons and windows on your site can be limited as well meaning they don’t fit the overall appearance of your site. They often carry advertising with them as well, which can diminish the overall professional appearance of your website.
Paid services
Signing up to a live chat software contract can yield more professional results. Packages generally start at around £20pm but don’t offer all that much more than the freeware software. You have to upgrade to the more premium packages in order to get full customization of your chat icons and windows for example. With the more premium packages you do get more useful functions like basic reporting and some CRM compatibility for gathering user information to follow up leads, but the costs can quickly stack up meaning that you can end up paying a lot more. Chat bots are sometimes an additional (costly) function, which can be useful for filtering chats as well.
And all of this still doesn’t cover the elephant in the room. Not only do you have to pay for the software, but you also need to pay someone to answer the chats as well (unless you do it yourself). Being available to answer chats all day, every day is a huge drain on resources and is the number one reason that small and medium sized businesses give up on live chat. It’s simply too costly and too much effort to be worth it.
Manned service
There is an alternative which is rapidly growing in popularity, especially for smaller businesses that can’t afford to have a team of customer services representatives on hand 24/7. Manned chat provides not just the software, but also the staff to answer chats on your behalf. The software is often state of the art because this is their core business and they get economies of scale from providing multiple customers, meaning that the costs can be even cheaper than a lot of paid software. At Live Web Chat, our packages start from just £25pm, so not only is it cheaper than many paid packages, but you also get a team of fully trained staff at your disposal, to answer all of your chats on your behalf.
If you’re worried about whether an agent that doesn’t work for your business can effectively help your website visitors, why not sign up for a free trial and find out what our customers already know. Live Web Chat takes the hassle out of customer service.
“Do what you do best and outsource the rest”
Peter Drucker
Here at Live Web Chat, we can help support your customers with our powerful software and professional team of agents working directly via your website, answering queries, and engaging with clients the moment they ask a question. We offer a highly personalised service, getting to know and understand your business so that we can help your website visitors quickly and effectively, achieving excellent levels of customer service for you and your business.
Contact us today to find out more about how Live Web Chat can help you convert website visitors into paying clients. You can find out more about what we offer on our website, or by calling us on 01273 741113.