It might seem odd that, in a survey of merchants that have implemented live chat on their Websites, “optimization of live chat” was fourth on the list of site improvements that they planned to implement this holiday season. But the high showing of chat optimization (behind “moderate design changes,” navigation, and landing pages, and tied with on-site search) indicates that “like SEO, the live chat job is never done,” says Ross Haskell, director of marketing for Bold Software, which conducted the survey.
In terms of technical implementation, live chat is relatively straightforward. “It’s just a very small snippet of HTML code,” Haskell says. “You can have a chat button on your Website and implement that in a matter of hours or days.” The optimization is more a matter of modifying how you use the tool.
Among the 410 participants surveyed by Bold, evaluating their canned messaging was the top priority when optimizing their live chat functionality for the holidays. “What you say to your customers is something that you can and should tweak over time,” Haskell says. By testing variations in your scripts, you’ll find which approaches and turns of phrase are most effective. What’s more, you’ll want to continually update your scripts to remain consistent with ad and marketing campaigns, promotions, and the like.
While you’re at it, you can modify some of your chat button images as well. In addition to your standard chat button, you could include one that reads “Chat with me about our free shipping offer,” for example, on certain pages or push it forward as a proactive invitation to help close a sale.
In fact, the second most popular change respondents planned to implement was taking their chat from reactive—waiting to respond to a site visitor’s question—to proactive. You could initiate a chat when you notice that a visitor has been on a given page for a longer-than-average length of time, say, or if he continues to toggle back and forth between the same two pages.
The third most anticipated change was empowering agents to offer incentives. For instance, an agent could offer a discount to visitors who abandon a purchase—which certainly ties in with taking a more proactive approach to chat.
Expanding your live chat’s functionality to include cobrowsing can also help you proactively close sales. Cobrowsing enables a live chat agent to actually share a browser session with a site visitor: navigating for the visitor, highlighting specific features, and even inputting text into forms.
And if your site doesn’t have any live chat functionality at all, Haskell (not surprisingly) insists that it’s not too late to implement it in time for the Christmas rush. At the very least, you could start off by using it to monitor site visitors and provide limited chat sessions.
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